


From The Ashes

by Ankaret



Series: A Wand With Sixteen Strings [5]
Category: Harry Potter - Rowling, Marlow series - Forest
Genre: Crossover, F/M, Time Travel, aw16siverse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-13
Updated: 2009-12-13
Packaged: 2017-10-04 09:41:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 11
Words: 44,588
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28567
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ankaret/pseuds/Ankaret
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When a person who is pure of heart wishes on the Malfoy Wishing Rock... all kinds of things happen.  Time-travel! Cabbages! Duels! Abductions! Conservatories! Butlers! Toads!</p><p>A new, DH-compliant sequel to <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/works/28534">A Wand With Sixteen Strings</a>, set down a different leg of the Trousers of Time to <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/works/28565">Home From Sea</a>, for reasons that will become apparent. I do apologise for the branching weirdness of the Marlow / Potter space-time continuum.  One of these days I'll draw a chart.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Fields of Destruction

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by [this prompt](http://community.livejournal.com/trennels/54923.html?thread=741515&style=mine#t741515) of [](http://thewhiteowl.livejournal.com/profile)[**thewhiteowl**](http://thewhiteowl.livejournal.com/)'s, in which she said that some Ann/Draco would be lovely.
> 
> Chapter titles from Dire Straits' _Brothers In Arms_.

It all began at Vincent Crabbe's funeral. It all _ended_ a hundred and eighty-seven years earlier, but we'll get to that presently.

Draco Malfoy didn't remember inviting the woman in the blue suit, but then he didn't remember much about the hurried days that came between the Battle of Hogwarts and the small, rained-on ceremony. If his mother had turned up leading a matched team of eight Thestrals in nodding black plumes, he'd probably have assumed that the lugubrious goblin funeral director had slipped in _and then of course you'll want the formation team of Thestrals_ between all the awful, workaday calculations about the cost of coffins and the fee to the Ministry for safe disposal of Vincent's wand, and why _that_ should cost the estate a hundred and fifty Galleons Draco had no idea, but it didn't seem to matter.

There had been a _pro forma_ offer from the Ministry to include Vincent in the official ceremony of remembrance at Hogwarts, but frankly Draco didn't see why he should make life any easier for the Ministry, even when Professor Slughorn showed up to try to talk him into it by explaining how it would _heal wounds_ to have a Slytherin banner in the procession. It wouldn't heal any of Vincent's wounds.

Besides, as far as Draco was concerned, school felt as if it had ended half a lifetime ago rather than a couple of weeks, and people who carried wearing Gryffindor ties into late middle-age and so on were... well, they were a bit like Professor Slughorn. Draco wasn't sure that he was morally any better than Professor Slughorn - was fairly sure, in fact, that he wasn't - but he was _different_, and that was at least a small thing to cling on to.

To do Professor Slughorn justice, he did at least turn out for the funeral, even though he looked pained at the lack of graveside comforts. He kept fortifying himself against the elements with refreshments from the contents of a large japanned tea-tray which he had animated to follow him about, and even then, as Draco could hear him fussily telling Blaise Zabini, the rain was getting into his half-boots. Blaise looked faintly nauseated and then took several chocolate biscuits when no one was looking.

Blaise, Draco and Gregory Goyle were the only members of Vincent's year present. Draco was quite glad of the absence of Pansy, whose reported behaviour in the Great Hall had pained him greatly - he hadn't expected her to go flinging herself into the fray on Neville Longbottom's say-so, but he hadn't expected her to be _stupid_, either - and also of the lack of Theodore Nott, who was rather _too_ interested in corpses and had spent much of his final term trying to raise Inferi.

The rest of the Slytherins had apparently decided that prudence was the better part of great ambition and were nowhere to be seen, and it wasn't as if Vincent had been one for making friends in other Houses. Professor McGonagall had sent a representative in the form of that great idiot Hagrid, who was hulking about at the back looking squalid.

The vicar intoned some words that Draco didn't listen to. The vicar was one of the Cattermoles from the village, who had, to Draco's certain knowledge, been feuding with the Crabbes over a disputed fence since 1867. Several of the rest of the Cattermoles had turned up as well and were looking unctuously pious, possibly because they now believed that there was no one left to argue about the fence.

As it happened, Draco knew that Vincent had left his personal effects, such as they were, to Goyle, and that the cottage had gone to Zabini's mother of all people, due to a complicated pile-up of legacies involving one of her earlier husbands, a Crabbe great-uncle from Cumbria. He was inclined to back Ms Zabini rather than the Cattermoles. She was glamorously present at the graveside, wearing sunglasses and an enormously wide-brimmed hat despite the rain, and turning one elegant shoulder to the reporter from the _Daily Prophet_, a lugubrious young man with a soggy owl sitting on his shoulder ready to carry off any exclusives. Draco didn't know what he was expecting.

Possibly he was expecting Lucius and Narcissa to make an appearance. If so, he was out of luck. Narcissa _was_ there, thoughtfully offering a handkerchief to Goyle's mother, but she had Polyjuiced herself to look like a spry elderly witch in a deerstalker hat, and the reporter paid her no attention whatever. As for Lucius, he had locked himself in the Manor library after the Battle of Hogwarts and had remained in there ever since, sustaining himself on meals winched up to him via the dumbwaiter and claiming to be writing his memoirs. Draco wasn't sure whether he was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder or merely acute social embarrassment. He thought he should probably do something about it, but he didn't, at present, seem to have the energy to think what. At least Lucius wasn't likely to try to make the place his funeral pyre; the library had been hung about with the strongest possible fireproofing spells after one of the family's Black connections (Draco _thought_ his great-great-uncle Rasalgethi, but he wasn't at all certain) had tried to immolate himself in there after a disagreement about implementation of the Taliesin Tridecimal System in the late 1890s.

And then there was the woman in blue. It was a dark blue, entirely suitable for a funeral where one didn't know the deceased well enough to wear black, and she was quite dry-eyed, which ruled out (one would have thought) the possibility that she was Vincent's hitherto unheard-of wife. In any case, whilst not as spectacular as Ms Zabini, she was _certainly_ out of Vincent's league. She was the sort of woman who you could look at for some minutes without noticing that she was a blue-eyed blonde with a handsome figure. Draco wondered in appreciative fascination how she did it.

She didn't seem to know anyone there except Zabini (though it was entirely possible, knowing Zabini's habits, that he didn't know her from Professor Slughorn's tea-tray either and was just trying to oil his way into an acquaintance) and Draco had expected her to slip away after the ceremony; but then he saw Narcissa heading over to her, firmly gathering her into the fold along with Mrs Goyle and Ms Zabini, and making sure she took hold of the Portkey, which took the form of a tasteful memorial wreath. Knowing his mother as he did, Draco was certain that the 'Secret Mrs Crabbe' theory had occurred to her also, and that the blonde wasn't going anywhere until Narcissa had either confirmation or denial.

He put his own hand on the next wreath, suppressed a shudder of distaste as he realised he was sharing the Portkey with Hagrid, wished he _hadn't_ bothered suppressing it as Hagrid in his turn looked as if he was considering hiding in his own beard rather than acknowledging Draco's existence, and found himself in the cool tiled surroundings of the pantry at Malfoy Manor.

"There's sherry in the third best receiving-room," he said politely to Hagrid and the two Cattermoles who had also come in on the same Portkey, since he supposed he must say something. "And there's something that might be a hybrid Niffler infesting the strawberry patch. It's dug up two separate caches of Roman coins and a poison-necklace that we all thought went out of the family when Julia Nobilia Malfoy married into the Venetian aristocracy, but it seems to be having trouble digesting them."

"We're not here as _help_," said one of the Cattermoles, who evidently had never met Hagrid.

"Wouldn't expect you to be on any occasion," said Draco briskly. "As I said, sherry in the third-best receiving room, out of the door and up the stairs, turn left when you start hearing the harpsichord."

Hagrid's head nearly bumped against the elegant moulding of the roof of the pantry. He was holding a large slouch hat against his belly, presumably in respect for Vincent rather than Draco. "Yeh recovered, I suppose?" he said grudgingly.

_I've spent the past two years in hell,_ Draco thought, _but it's not as if I didn't make the occasional effort to invite you to join me_. He didn't feel any compunction at all about his part in getting the man sacked. Hagrid wasn't fit to be a professor, and Professor Snape would have got rid of him on becoming Headmaster if Umbridge hadn't done it a year earlier. He supposed that Hagrid _was_ among the people he owed a more general apology to for the complete, utter, scrabbling-for-a-fingerhold-on-a-constantly-tilting-cliff _mess_ he'd made of staying alive for the last year under the rule of the Dark Lord, and he didn't suppose _I did it so that he wouldn't torture my parents to death_ would cut much ice with a Gryffindor, even an expelled one.

"We didn't really see eye-to-eye at Hogwarts, did we?" was the best he could manage. _And not just because I didn't have a stepladder_. "I'm sorry for my part of it."

Hagrid looked profoundly dubious, in as much as one could tell when the dubiousness was being overlaid upon his usual expression of even more profound stupidity. "It's not me yeh owe an apology to," he grunted. "Which way did yeh say to the strawberry bed?"

Draco's brain performed a ferret-like backflip; he then realised that whilst, in Malfoy family cant, the Strawberry Bed was the one embroidered all over with strawberry leaves and topped with a disgustingly flamboyant coronet which had come into the family when an early nineteenth-century namesake of his eloped with a rather louche widowed duchess, in everyday usage it was synonymous with _strawberry patch_ and that Hagrid was _not_ in fact, suggesting that he should expiate his sins by... working his passage. So to speak. "Out of the door and down the steps, turn right at the fountain," he said in a somewhat strangled tone of voice.

"It 'appens when they don't get the right balance of trace metals," Hagrid mumbled to himself as he ducked himself almost double to get out through the doorway. "If you don't want to nurse the poor little mite, I suppose as I could find room for..."

"Be my guest," said Draco lavishly to his back, thinking that Hagrid and the whatever-it-was could run away to the South of France together for all he cared, and if it meant there were no more steaming little piles of half-digested copper burning holes in the front lawns, so much the better.

The receiving-room was full of people in black milling about as if courage were some form of static electricity, and if they shuffled about enough they might work up enough to be the first person to leave. Goyle fell upon Draco, nearly drenching him in sherry and some things that Draco thought were profiteroles. Draco wasn't certain profiteroles were appropriate at a funeral, and suspected the advisory hand of Professor Slughorn. He really must have words with the staff, which consisted of an irritatingly keen band of house-elves on some kind of ghastly Ministry-sponsored Work To Freedom programme which Draco was morally certain none of them understood.

"You all right?" said Goyle. "I thought - when you went off on your own - "

"The Portkey dumped me in the pantry. I think the parameters of the spell probably weren't set up to expect something the size of Hagrid."

Goyle's comprehension visibly stuttered to a stop at _parameters_. "So, you're all right, then?" he persisted.

Draco was almost tempted to tell him. Luckily, he realised in time that what Goyle wanted - deserved, especially at a time like this - were not answers, but reassurance. "I'll be fine," he said with disgusting, near-Gryffindor quantities of stiff upper lip. "Is your mum OK, though?"

Goyle turned and ploughed his way back through the mostly Cattermole crowd, some of whom were putting profiteroles in their pockets, towards his mother, a dumpy, defeated-looking little woman in rusty black. Draco was uneasily glad that Goyle was over with her and not with him; it felt unbalanced, a constant reminder of Crabbe _not_ being there off his other shoulder, though of course he would never say so. For want of anything else to do, he went over to the large picture of Crabbe in Quidditch strip which had temporary pride of place over the mantelpiece. The portrait clenched its jaw with determination and waved one fist in the air. Draco wondered, suddenly chilled, whether that had been an unsuspected gleam of intelligence in Crabbe's eye, and concluded that he would never know now.

"I know you were very close. I'm so sorry," said the woman in blue.

She looked teasingly familiar up close. He'd definitely seen her somewhere - not just seen, either, been aware of her with _all_ his senses, though considering that he was only just emerging from adolescence and she was, as had already been established, not only out of Vincent's league but probably out of his as well, that wasn't any too surprising. She wore her hair, which was golden, and well worth looking at, in a plaited style around the back of her head, and she smelt of some enticing thing that was halfway between lily soap and flapjacks. "I am _terribly_ sorry," he said, taking refuge in exquisitely good manners. "I know we've met. Were you one of the Triwizard Tournament delegation from Beauxbatons?"

She blushed. He had the feeling that compliments didn't come her way often, which was proof that the world was demented. As if more proof were needed. "Oh, no. _I'm_ sorry," she said again. "I should have realised you wouldn't remember me. I barely knew Vincent, really, and the one time we _did_ really talk I thought he was a Hufflepuff second-year girl - I'd only come back to Hogwarts because Ginty's trunk somehow got Apported to me in Bujumbura, and..."

Ginty? He remembered a Ginty from school. Ginty Marlow, that was it, which made it a fair likelihood that this was one or other of her sisters. "We did experiment rather with Polyjuice Potion," he said, hoping that it sounded vaguely dashing, though it hadn't been, in the slightest. He'd known Vincent disliked it; he hadn't known that Vincent had gone so far as to express his dislike to someone who wasn't a Slytherin. It was another... his brain jittered away from _nail in the coffin_... another proof that he hadn't known Vincent as well as he might have done.

Whichever sister this was, he wanted to keep talking to her. "So - um - what were you doing in Bujumbura?"

Missionary work, it appeared, but then she'd been called home by a circular proclaiming a shortage of nurses at St. Mungo's. Draco stared at her in wonderment. He had never met anybody who thought those Ministry exhortations applied to _them_. "And what are _you_ doing?" she asked brightly.

He couldn't believe she'd said it. He looked into her face for mockery and found none; and there she was, at the end of an unrolling and ever more embarrassing silence, awaiting an answer... "Waiting to see whether the Ministry's peace-and-reconciliation policy involves sending me to Azkaban," he said, shocked into the flat truth.

She blushed again. "Oh, but _surely_..."

"Surely Harry Potter wouldn't have saved my life just to see it drag on for - what's the average - five years eleven months of the Dementors' company? You don't know him like I do."

"I was in the same House as him. I think you're wrong."

_I was in the same House as him_ made it certain she wasn't one of the twins in Draco's year, who had been in Hufflepuff. Who, then? Not Ginty; she'd said _Ginty's trunk_. Besides, from what he remembered of Ginty, she was the sort of person who would cry off the funerals even of her nearest and dearest out of a complicated blend of squeamishness and a desire to look interesting. Draco understood that kind of thinking at a deep and intimate level, but that didn't mean he admired it. He felt momentarily dizzy under the accumulated weight of worry and lack of sleep. She was still talking to him. He wasn't sure what about, but probably Harry Potter still. "He's a good person," she assured him earnestly.

If his inner resources were a barometer, the mercury would be bumping against the bottom; he simply had no more to give, of politeness, of _anything_. "I think you think that because _you_ are," he said with the last of gentleness.

"I think you're completely overwrought and you shouldn't have any more sherry," she said firmly. "Come over here - sit down - " He cast one last look at the portrait of Crabbe, which was trying to fold its own lower lip up over its nose, and allowed himself to be led over to a wing-chair. Just to add to everything else, Draco heard what he was very much afraid was a _cackle_ from the library. He hoped that cackling wasn't going to become a _regular_ component of Lucius' memoirs.

It was looking _up_ at her from the chair, rather than across and slightly down, that finally jogged loose his memory. Not just _a_ Marlow. _Ann_ Marlow.

The last time he'd given any thought whatever to Ann Marlow they'd been the kind of thoughts that he'd made Crabbe and Goyle go and have in the bathroom because they both _groaned_ so. For about three months, when he was fifteen and the entire Slytherin Dungeon had been positively awash with hormones (with, once again, the exception of Theodore Nott, whose contribution to the general pheromonal fug was to keep a box full of partially dissected wildlife under the bed) he'd been unable to so much as see her smile and sit down with her seventh-year friends at the Gryffindor table without having Those Thoughts.

It started when he saw her walking back to Gryffindor Tower from the Prefects' bathroom, smiling to herself in a collected way and towelling the ends of her splendid hair. He had spent the remainder of the term hoping for an opportunity to silence all the other Gryffindors with a devastatingly witty word when she had a difference of conscience with them, which seemed to happen once or twice a year and dragged on forever, because the world would end in fire and ice before a Gryffindor admitted they'd been wrong about a matter of principle. The opportunity had never come, which, given the Gryffindors' willingness to settle arguments with their fists, had perhaps been a blessing.

He couldn't think how he'd forgotten. Perhaps it was simply because thinking about _anything_ to do with the years when he'd had nothing better to do than score points off Harry Potter and wonder about a career in potion-making... didn't so much _hurt_ as seem, these days, completely and incandescently irrelevant.

Lucius cackled again and seemed to be throwing the furniture about. Ann looked nervously upward. "Oh dear, have you got ghouls? They do tend to get agitated around the time of funerals, I'm afraid."

"Thankfully not. That would be my father."

"Oh. There _is_ a programme at St. Mungo's..." she began unconvincedly.

"How long do you think he'd survive at St. Mungo's before someone with a grudge put a pillow over his face?"

"Draco Malfoy!" The intonation in her voice was absolutely the same as when he'd been a second-year and she a lofty fifth-year prefect. "I know you don't know me very well, but I _wouldn't_ work at a place where that kind of thing went on. I don't think you know what you're saying. Oh, goodness, you've gone completely white. Have some chocolate. _Now_. Honestly, you're just like Ginty or Lawrie - highly strung - "

"Don't even joke about the Ministry re-introducing capital punishment," he croaked. He wasn't sure she heard him.

"And you've been worrying about this - all this time - _and_ had to look after your father and arrange a funeral for your best friend?" He submitted to being fussed over. It was quite soothing, really. He felt as if he were floating. _Had_ someone levitated the wing-chair? He couldn't see any likely suspects, though Blaise was glowering at him. "It must have been a terrible shock. But at least you know he was - doing his bit - trying to defend - " Her voice tailed away.

Draco did not particularly feel like going into the circumstances of Crabbe's death, particularly since in his present mental state if he opened his mouth he'd probably begin with _yes, it was a terrible shock, I had no idea he knew that curse existed, let alone that he was going to try and use it._

"I didn't know him as well as... There were things about him I wish I'd known," he said, which was true, as far as I went, even though what he mostly wished was that he'd known Crabbe hated him soon enough to do something about it.

"In any case," she said, kneeling down beside the chair as if she might pat his hand given enough of a run-up at it, "I happen to know that the Ministry is _not_ inclined to trust the Dementors again, not after they went over to - "

"It's all right. He doesn't come when you call his name any more. Like a rather badly-trained poodle, I always thought."

He wondered whether she would flinch. She didn't. She looked ruffled, and as if she was about to say _Now then, let's have no more of that_, but she wasn't giving him that Gryffindor you-were-predestined-to-be-the-Dark-Lord's-henchman-from-your-cradle look. "There's no need to be brave - " she began.

"That's a good thing, isn't it, considering how bad I always was at it."

She looked as if she were going to say something in reply to that; but Narcissa had noticed what was going on and was coming over to fuss, and Ann was effacing herself, and then getting scooped up by wretched Blaise, who probably had any number of smooth and clever things to say to her, and steered towards sherry.

"Don't tell me it's one of those _when I am cold in the earth_ curses," said Narcissa practically. "Give me my wand."

Impossible to tell his mother that his resilience was not infinite. She knew it was not, just as he thought he had a fair idea of the limits of hers; but the only way they could even begin to live in the long shadow of the events of the last two years was to pretend, as hard as they could, that there was no shadow there at all. "It's not a curse. It's probably the profiteroles. Are all these people ever going to go away?"

"I thought you'd like me to ask Gregory to stay - no, perhaps not." She looked long-sufferingly around at the guests. "At least there's no one dangling from the ceiling."

"We must be recovering if we can joke about Lord... Him."

Narcissa looked shocked; and then appreciative, and then very vague indeed, as if rotating something in her mind's eye. "I was thinking about your grandfather's funeral," she said and pressed a kiss onto the side of his brow. "We survived that, even if your Aunt Bellatrix did try to test the purity of your blood by attempting to drown you in the punchbowl, and we can survive another hour or so of the Cattermoles."

"In that case I think you should be informed that Professor Slughorn seems to have got into the good brandy."

Narcissa looked up at the ceiling. "I'll send one of the house-elves to shout through the door to Lucius. Maybe he'll feel strongly enough about it to come down and defend the contents of his cellar. He never did like Professor Slughorn."

Goyle lumbered back over. "Some of the Cattermoles were talking about having a bit of a knees-up."

"In the village?"

"No, they thought you might take the dust-sheets off the ballroom. One of them's got the sheet-music to something called the Harry Potter Stomp."

Draco extricated himself from the chair. Time to be a host again. He felt better, at least, for the chocolate. "Go and tell them to all have another sherry and then I'll take them on the tour of the Monument Gallery. The _long_ tour."

This ruse had its effect; a female Cattermole with two profiterole-sticky Cattermole children clinging to her hands came over to him and said that they really must be going. The rest of the guests left shortly afterwards. Draco had no idea why it was that it took so much bravery to be the first to leave social occasions at the Manor; his family had managed to breed the blood-thirst out of the peacocks several generations ago, more or less.

Mrs Goyle offered to stay and help clear up. He'd rather hoped Ann Marlow might, as well, but he didn't see her. He very much hoped she hadn't left with Blaise. The more he considered this, the more it became a fixed and sullen certainty that she _had_ left with Blaise, and eventually, stacking glasses on trays so as not to make work for the house-elves, he asked Narcissa about it.

"Yes, she did offer. Twice. But the last thing I wanted was _more_ Gryffindors on the premises. It feels like we've only just cleared out the ones your father used to keep under the drawing-room floor," said Narcissa, clearly less interested in her guests than in outrage at finding a large hole burnt into the leaf of one of her house-plants and a pipe knocked out in its pot. "Honestly, my _poor_ Bouncing Scabroot, it'd only just managed to give up. People are so _thoughtless_." She put down the pot and picked up the picture of Vincent, which leered at her. "Do you think Gregory would like this?"

"I know _I_ don't want it," said Draco wearily. "Give it to Professor Slughorn. Memorial of one of his students, fallen in the Battle of Hogwarts. It'll go over well with the Ministry."

"Yes, dear," said Narcissa absently. "And shall we send these flowers to St. Mungo's?"

"They do look as if they could use medical intervention," Draco agreed. He looked out of the window, at the empty drive.

He did not suppose he would ever see Ann Marlow again.


	2. Baptism of Fire

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter contains a sex scene.

_Six Years Later_

The teacups tinkled in the breakfast room of Malfoy Manor. Draco, who had more skill in reading teacups than might be expected from someone who had suffered several years of tuition from Sybill Trelawney, thought the forecast unsettled to stormy. His mother looked up from her owl post, looking divinely rumpled and dishevelled in a lacy dressing-gown. "We've had the most _encroaching_ letter from the Dragon Lady," she said without preamble.

Draco poured himself some coffee. "That is no way to speak of Charlie Weasley," he said, doing his best.

"Oh, not _him_. Though I have to say, the East Acre is looking distinctly charred since the Ministry made us hand it over to him for that endangered-dragon breeding project. And _so_ unfair, too." Narcissa lifted her delicately fluted teacup to her lips. "That dragon's blood in the attic was hundreds of years old, and I don't see how anyone could have expected _us_ to know about it. No, it's from that horrible Ministry woman. You'll have to go and talk her round."

"You're not asking me to go and have tea with Dolores Umbridge, are you?" said Draco dubiously. "Because that was a very long time ago, and whilst I admit I did approve of her methods at the time, she's been completely doo-lally for years. It'd be like sending you off to ask for the autograph of whoever were the equivalent of the Wyrd Sisters in 1970."

"I don't see that at all. Feargus Climping still has a fine voice for radio."

"He has a fine face for it, too," said Draco callously. "And as far as I know he doesn't spend all his time gibbering about the horrible horrible centaurs and their horrible horrible undercarriages. You'd think she'd been asked to umpire for a Quidditch match between the Montrose Magpies and Pride of Portree, in a high wind, with both teams in kilts."

"Quidditch and being very nearly murdered by centaurs are a _touch_ different..." Narcissa reached for toast. "Anyway, it's not her I mean. It's this Marlow person. Starts with _I'm sure you would be delighted_ and ends with _my very best wishes for your husband's recovery_ and in between she wants us to open the Manor up as a holiday retreat for war orphans. _War orphans!_" She shuddered delicately. "The more I think about it - and believe me, dearest, thinking about it is the last thing I _want_ to do - the more I realise it was sheer blind luck _you_ weren't a war orphan. It doesn't inspire me to want to face other people's."

Draco's hand closed over hers. Would he never be free of it, he wondered, not only his own guilt but the constant, distant-sea-on-shore reflected echoes of hers? He wasn't sure which was worse; being unsure of the exact depths of her remorse, or being unsure whether Lucius felt any at all. Which reminded him, he should probably see whether the house-elves had anything to report from the last time they went in to clear away Lucius' meals and to clean the small bathroom which he had apparently installed - and, considering his father had no official wand, Draco hated to think how or with what - in what had once been the shelves housing Aunt Eustochium's collection of classical erotica. There hadn't been any cackling in at least a week. Draco hoped that was a good sign.

"Besides," said Narcissa in a tone of voice that suggested she was trying to convince herself, "after all _this_ time, I dare say any war orphans left out there are probably hulking great broad-shouldered things with full beards or a litter of illegitimate babies each, depending. If I let them through the front door they'll probably sell the furniture to buy Firewhiskey with."

"This letter," Draco said carefully. "Does it come with any overtones whatever of _comply or we'll think about sending one of our apparatchiks over to assess whether your father / husband / delete as appropriate is actually in possession of his wits and therefore suitable for transfer to the New Improved And Honestly Dementor-Free Azkaban_?"

"Not as such, but you know the Ministry." Narcissa dabbed toast-crumbs away with a lacy handkerchief. "They want bribing, of course. They always want bribing. I've thought about it, and I've decided we can spare the Wishing Rock. I shouted as much to your father under the library door and he pushed a torn-out sheet of _disgusting_ Latin verse out at me, which I'm going to take as a yes. You can say it's to provide wishes for the orphans. I don't imagine for a moment that's the use they'll put it to, but it sounds good. They've given us an appointment at two o'clock. The _cheek_ of them. They _used_ to say _at your convenience, please inform us by owl of your approximate time of arrival_."

"And which one of the Marlows at the Ministry am I supposed to be bribing?" asked Draco resignedly, putting aside that morning's plans in favour of a trip to London. "If it's Peter, you're completely out of luck. He's never liked me, ever since I made fun of him being scared to go up on a broom."

"Do you pay no attention at all to current affairs?" enquired Narcissa irritably.

"No, I don't. Current affairs once had a very good try at killing me, and since then I've tried to keep them at arm's length. Someone else's arm, for preference, or _several_ someone elses holding hands."

Narcissa looked at him with most un-breakfastly acerbity. "I mean Ann Marlow, as you very well know. How that woman managed to hopscotch herself from emptying bedpans at St. Mungo's to the Department of Magical Accidents and Catastrophes - "

"Have you _met_ Peter and the twins?"

"I am thankful to say I have not - and then to the Department of Mysteries, and why war-orphans should come under Mysteries is - "

"A mystery to you?"

"If you're going to take _that_ tone, Draco, you can take yourself off to London at once and stop spoiling my appetite for breakfast. And what are you grinning about?"

He wasn't sure what he was grinning about, as he adjusted the plain high collar of his best robes in the hall mirror and regarded his own face as if he'd been Polyjuiced. It wasn't as if his path and Ann's had crossed in the past six years, much. He hadn't - thankfully - been invited to the weddings of either of her sisters, one of whom had married a centaur and one a Weasley, and in Draco's estimation it was very hard to tell which of them had ended up with the bigger horse's ass. He had been busy - had _made_ himself busy - and had avoided the London news in a way which, looking back on it rationally, it was hard not to see as pathological.

But there was Lucius, and the constant editing and adjusting of the truth that had to be done whenever anyone _asked_ about anything on which Lucius impinged, so as not to elicit either pity or disgust. After a while, it became easier not to see anyone at all. Or at least that was how he felt; he wasn't sure about Narcissa. She did seem to move in a smaller social circle than before the defeat of the Dark Lord, but that could be only too easily explained. She didn't seem to want to see Mrs Goyle, not having much in common with her; and Ms Zabini had recently married a very rich American wizard with the unfortunate name of Hopkins and gone off to live in New York.

Draco's own social life hadn't been noticeably more spectacular. There had been a few dates with Angelina Johnson, which fizzled out when it became clear that laughing about old Quidditch matches wasn't enough to sustain a friendship, let alone anything more; a painfully serious relationship with Hannah Abbott, about which Narcissa had trenchantly said that they'd had an idyllic three months, it was a pity that the relationship then dragged on for another eighteen; and a hugely embarrassing cup of coffee with a Ravenclaw called Terry Hunt, who had blushed horribly throughout, and that was absolutely the last time he was letting himself in for being set up for a blind date by Blaise.

Other than that, there were Lucius' investments to look after, and the estate, and his own Potions laboratory; and the days slipped by like a series of conversations with Hufflepuffs; worthy, bland and almost entirely indistinguishable.

He looked back into the breakfast-room to say his farewells before he left. Narcissa had evidently not forgiven him. She had decamped from the table to the window-seat, and was brooding over an exquisite and very new tapestry which was draped over her lap.

"Oh, _Mother_," said Draco.

"It's backed onto a bit of hessian from the old one," said Narcissa defensively. "Just like _that_ was backed onto some of the lining from the one that got mixed up with some altar-cloths and burnt during that Muggle misunderstanding in the 1640s."

Before his infuriated gaze, the tapestry embroidered itself with _Draco, b. 1980, m. 2004_ in perfect ice-grey cursive back-stitch, and then, next to it, in cautious rose-pink, began to outline an elaborate R.

"_Not_ Romilda Vane," said Draco firmly. "Under no circumstances. No."

Narcissa pouted at him. "I agree that her father's a -"

"Dreadful, cigar-munching not-quite-proven war profiteer with repellent taste in pinstriped robes?"

"- a little rough around the edges, but at least she's a pureblood."

"Do you want the Malfoy Line forever after to be notable for having jaws like a brick in a sock? A slightly unshaven-looking sock, in Romilda's case."

"That's really not kind. Just because she's rather Mediterranean-looking..." Narcissa tapped her wand on the R, which obligingly unstitched itself, and was replaced by a beguiling blue E. Draco watched it unfold, no wiser at the end than the beginning.

"Who's Ellie Cattermole?"

"You know quite well who Ellie Cattermole is. That nice girl who was issued the formal warning for Engorging the snails in the garden of Exquisabeth Zabini - Exquisabeth Shacklebolt - _Exquisabeth Hopkins'_ cottage."

"She's still at Hogwarts."

"She's eighteen. When I got engaged to your father..."

"Yes, and look how well _that_ turned out."

"Don't talk that way, dear."

"Sorry," Draco muttered, casting a glance upward in the direction of the library. "But still, given this family's recent track record, if I were Ellie Cattermole, I'd be running away as fast as I could with the nearest warm body, male, female or house-elf, that I could persuade to elope with me. And besides, if she's the one I'm thinking of, her mother was Muggleborn."

"Oh dear, is she one of _those_ Cattermoles? Thank you, dear, I hadn't realised."

The words _Ellie Cattermole_ unpicked themselves so fast Draco could hear a distinct whip-crack from the thread, and reassembled them into a longish name headed by an emerald-green V. Draco peered at them. "Who's Violanthe Gamp?"

"You remember, Draco, your dear little fifth cousin once removed Violanthe. You were forever meeting her at Christmas parties when you were young. Her parents sent her to Beauxbatons. She was always very fond of you."

Draco's brain reeled backwards; himself, fifteen, _not_ in the year before's Yule Ball robes like Crabbe and Goyle (both of whom resembled large badly wrapped green boiled sweets, as their robes failed to accommodate another year's growth) but in far more suitable high-collared silver, and a small girl who, to the adults' great amusement, had sat down on his hem and started carefully wiping her jammy fingers. "_Not Violanthe Gamp_," he said through gritted teeth.

"She's turned out very pretty. And she won't mind about - " with the most economical possible tilt of her ringlets, Narcissa indicated the trouble in the library, " - because everyone knows old Tendentius Gamp's spent the last twenty years mistaking himself for a flowerpot."

"Mother, I'm _going_. I only came in here to ask you where we keep the Wishing Rock."

"I sent one of the house-elves for it." Narcissa frowned. "It's all getting completely out of hand, Draco. There must be eighteen of them down there at least by now, and I don't think we're paying _any_ of them, and it's useless asking for so much as a drink of water between five and seven in the evening because they have - well, I don't know whether it's a prayer meeting or a union chapel, but one of them usually seems to be giving a speech and the rest stamp their feet and applaud, and then they _sing_. Hymn sort of tunes. There's one to the tune of _O God Our Help In Ages Past_ that goes _Respect Our Ways, Tho' Not Your Own_ and another _very_ popular one that I _think_ is _For Those In Peril On The Sea_ which starts _Ronald Weasley Is Good And Kind_..."

"Bruther is glad you are taking an interest in our efforts to better ourselves!" squeaked a voice at knee-level. "Bruther is asking you to respect our privacy, though, and not to be turning our resurgence of racial pride into an inauthentic and degrading tourist attraction. Here is the Wishing Rock. Bruther has wrapped it for you."

Draco looked down at the parcel. It was wrapped with origami-like precision and artifice. Inside, he knew, the Wishing Rock was long, pink on the outside and white on the inside (there were many hoary riddles to which the answer was _I am the Malfoy Wishing Rock_), almost petrified with age, and had written all the way through it, in Gothic lettering, _I Wish I Might_.

"Very good work, Bruther. If you ever decide to leave us and open one of those Muggle greeting-card shops, you could make a fortune."

"Bruther is aware of the cultural differences that cause you to believe that house-elf skills are only valuable when exchanged for money, as for example in a nasty, Muggle greeting-card shop, sir," said Bruther indulgently. "Skills like patching and wrapping and creating new storage solutions from string - "

"So that's what that cat's cradle in the back kitchen is. I thought it was an assault course," murmured Narcissa.

" - are valid and living folk art forms passed down from elf to elf as a sacred trust across the centuries."

"Good?" ventured Draco, more or less at sea with all this. "What's this pattern called?"

"Thank you for taking an interest, but that would be a craft mystery," said Bruther repressively. "If you would be wanting a jug of water and a tray of glasses at four forty-five this afternoon, so as not to disturb our meeting, Madam Narcissa, we shall be happy to provide such if you communicate with Bruther in the scullery." He bowed deeply and Disapparated.

"Are they _all_ called Bruther?" Draco wondered. "No wonder I never noticed there were eighteen of them."

"I _think_ so," said Narcissa cautiously. "Are you sure you wouldn't like to at least _meet_ Violanthe Gamp? She's coming over here to study banking at Gringotts in the autumn, you could take her out for tea."

"I'm not taking her anywhere that might involve jam." A tactical error. Narcissa would undoubtedly suggest the opera next, or possibly a bracing walk on the downs. "_I'm not taking her anywhere at all_, because it would be either raising false hopes or confirming old disappointments, and I can't see that either of us would be any the better for it."

"If you don't like my choices," said Narcissa with that steel-trap-in-drawer-full-of-exquisite-lace-handkerchiefs delivery that Draco was not sure he'd ever be old enough to anticipate, "you might consider going out _yourself_ and finding me a grandchild."

"Are you expecting me to discover one abandoned on the doorstep?"

"No, Draco dear, I'm expecting you to bring home a bride. You are the one who seems to have trouble with the concept."

"I suppose doing it that way does run less of a risk of the heir being pecked to death by peacocks. Good _morning_, Mother."

"Good morning, Draco," said Narcissa. The embroidery obediently unstitched itself again, turned an unpleasant toad-yellow, and began to hesitate between the names of several of the Cumbrian Crabbe cousins.

Judging that any statement along the lines of _I am not marrying Urraca, Gundstrith, or Cuneburg Crabbe_ would only give a wholly unwelcome habitation and a name to the airy nothing of his mother's thoughts and moreover very likely make him miss his train, Draco left. Narcissa smiled vaguely at the tapestry and tapped her wand on her own name in the row above; the _1955_ under her name began unstitching its last digit and transforming from a 5 into an 8.

The Express puffed its way out of Malfoy Halt and onward towards London. Draco leaned back in his armchair, refused an offer of brandy from an elderly ghoul in a suit with starched dickey, and looked out of the window. He could have used the Floo Network, but he needed some time to prepare his mind for the ordeal ahead; it was a long time, longer than he'd thought, since he'd seen anyone outside a very limited social circle, and he could do with an hour or so to don his mental armour and shield against the pullulating magical masses, rather than stepping out of a fireplace straight into the middle of them.

It was to his intense annoyance, therefore, that he noticed Marcus Flint standing about witlessly on the platform at Salisbury. Draco buried his blond head hastily in his hitherto unopened copy of the _Daily Prophet_, but it was no good; Flint flung himself into the large spotted sofa opposite, doing its springs no good at all.

"On your way to the Ministry?" said Flint with officious familiarity. "I don't suppose anything else would get you up to London these days. People say you've turned into a recluse. Apart from old Smethwyk, he said you'd probably caught Dragon Pox and lost your looks."

"Considering the way Smethwyk always used to try to corner the smallest member of the Quidditch team in the showers, I should think he'd be much more worried about catching any kind of pox than I would."

"That was you for a good long time, wasn't it?" said Flint reminiscently, and indulged in a bout of hearty laughter which summoned the tottering ghoul. Flint ordered a pint of red currant rum. "So you said you were off to the Ministry?"

"I can't imagine what business of yours it is if I am, Flint."

"Just that if you are, I'll go along with you." Flint took a long drink of the rum and smacked his lips. "Can't face the Dragon Lady without a drink inside me. Dreadful business. You look at her and think, hmm, nice cuddlesome blonde, and then you look around at the office and realise that thirty years ago, that's probably what some sad son of a Snorkack thought about Dolores Umbridge. She's not at the plates-with-kittens on stage yet, but it's only a matter of time." He took another restorative swig from his glass, which was by now half empty. "And, to think, when I was at Hogwarts, I thought Giles and Rowan were the scary ones."

"She can't be that bad," said Draco, remembering Vincent's funeral.

Flint gave a theatrical shudder. "You look into those baby-blue eyes of hers sometime. Someone said to me once they were surprised she didn't Sort Hufflepuff, but believe me, you only get that absolute, ice-cold, _I-was-born-right-and-you-were-born-wrong_ moral conviction out of a Gryffindor."

"What did you do to annoy her?" said Draco sceptically.

Flint leaned back, kicked off his shoes (which the ghoul solicitously removed and began to polish) and explained a long tale of woe involving an attempt to repatriate a young alleged war orphan to Switzerland under cover of returning a consignment of cursed cuckoo-clocks. Apparently the story began when the child's mother went into labour in the middle of her NEWTS. There had then been some kind of custody battle, ending when the mother filed for custody with the Ministry stating that the father was in with some terrible band of Neo-Grindelwaldians or other, a claim Draco thought profoundly unlikely; if there _were_ Neo-Grindelwaldians out there, his luck simply wasn't good enough that he could have lived twenty-four years without being involved in some ghastly entanglement with them.

From there, Flint's narrative became ever more involved and self-exculpatory; Draco gathered that it had ended with the mother first in St. Mungo's and then in the small graveyard in its grounds, leaving the unfortunate brat Edward Oeschli in bureaucratic limbo. "And Madam Marlow just says that he'll be starting at Hogwarts in another year and that whilst the Muggle orphanage obviously isn't the place for him, the Ministry will find him a foster-family," said Flint indignantly. "When he's got a perfectly good father in Lucerne who's no more a Neo-Grindelwaldian than I am."

"_Are_ you a Neo-Grindelwaldian?" asked Draco with interest.

Flint puffed out his cheeks indignantly. "Of course I'm not a Neo-Grindelwaldian!"

Draco bit back _why, did you fail the entrance exam?_ "And why do you care, anyway? Forgive me, but you never struck me as Marcus Flint, the Orphan's Friend."

"Giles Marlow talked me into it," said Flint irritably. "Wanted to borrow my flying Muggle car, and then one thing led to another."

"I didn't think you knew Giles Marlow that well. You weren't even in the same year, were you?"

Flint looked uncomfortable. "Long story. Squib cousin of mine - one of the Flint-Foleys, but he goes by Foley - used to teach at the Muggle Royal Naval Academy at Dartmouth. Anyway, I wanted to get those cuckoo-clocks back out of the country with no questions asked before another one exploded. And this was _her own family_, mind you, Malfoy, and she came down on them like a ton of rules-and-regulations bricks. _Frightening_."

"I still don't see why it was Mysteries and not International Magical Co-operation," yawned Draco, more shaken than he would care to admit, as the train came puffing into Paddington and laid up beside Platform Pi, wheezing like an asthmatic aunt in a tight corset.

"The Neo-Grindelwaldian connection, I suppose. I'd have thought you'd be a bit more sympathetic." Flint looked put-out. He fumbled in one pocket. "I say - Malfoy, old fellow - you wouldn't be able to shout me twenty Galleons?"

"I would not," said Draco promptly. "You still owe me five from when we were at school. I don't expect them back, but I'm not throwing good money after bad."

Flint's face darkened. "I wasn't going to say anything," he said, "but you might find _something of interest_ in the Skulk and Whistle on Knockturn Alley. Room seventeen. And the best of wizarding luck with the Dragon Lady." He whistled. "I'll tell you something, it's a damn good thing she wasn't on the Dark Lord's side. We'd have won." He pushed his way off the train and was gone into the crowd. Draco took a deep breath and followed him.

The train had got in with time to spare. Draco spent a while perusing the new books in Flourish &amp; Blotts; had a rather nerve-jangled drink at a corner table in the Leaky Cauldron; and then found himself with three-quarters of an hour still in hand and no wish to continue shoving his way through crowds of wizards on the street outside or sitting in here nerving himself up in case he saw anyone he knew. Flint's suggestion of the fireplace probably meant that it was unpleasantly magically trapped; but there was nothing to stop him strolling round to Diagon Alley and taking a look the old-fashioned way...

Through the small window outside, he saw Millicent Bulstrode and Tracey Davis, flushed and cheerful with a morning's shopping. Draco made his mind up. He hurried out past them, giving them the smallest possible nod in passing, and made for Knockturn Alley.

The Skulk and Whistle was a narrow-boned, shabby little building, its upper stories leaning out over Knockturn Alley as if to say something lewd and possibly libellous to the house opposite. Its foyer was done out in shades of spiderweb and mould, and no one was at the desk. Draco made his way quietly up the stairs. Room seventeen was almost at the top. He could hear faint laughter from within.

Faint, _familiar_ laughter. Laughter that he hadn't heard in the last six years. Cold, unpleasant, somewhat satirical laughter; but _not a bloody cackle_, which was the salient point. Draco tapped his wand against the door, murmured "Alohomora!" and let himself in.

Two bodies were heaving about on the dirty bed. The further was female, as far as Draco could determine from the back of her head and from the bared, unfleshy, curiously unerotic side of one shoulder, one hip and one leg; she had short, bushy brown hair cut in a boringly conservative style, and appeared to still be caught up in the after-currents of laughter. The nearer had hair that had been as blond as Draco's own before it turned yet more silvery still. Some of it was sticking to his sweaty pale back, and some was flopping along in time with his... efforts. Draco looked away before his eye could travel even further downward. He caught the eye of a tarty-looking witch in a portrait on the wall, and wished he hadn't. "_Lucius_?" he said incredulously.

Lucius reacted as if he'd been bitten by an Acromantula. The much younger witch he was in bed with - and Draco was rapidly arriving at horrible conclusions about exactly who _that_ was - reacted with surprise, displeasure, and an extremely unpleasant curse, which Draco only just deflected. "What are you doing here?" she demanded.

"Oh, get stuffed, Mudblood," said Draco, temporarily reverting to fourteen years old in his shock. "Actually, that was what you were in the process of doing, wasn't it? Never mind. Father, _what in Merlin's name are you doing out of the library?_ And sane enough to - "

"Perform?" suggested Hermione Weasley, nastily.

"I was going to say, sane enough to Charm you. Or - oh, _Merlin_, tell me it wasn't an Unforgiveable."

"If anyone's mind was going to leap to the use of Unforgiveables during sex I expect it would be you," snapped Hermione.

He was going to say _Or you_, more or less on reflex; and then he remembered the way his Aunt Bellatrix had... behaved. Moreover, Hermione had had a hand in saving his life, which meant he _supposed_ he owed her at least some courtesy... "I can't stand here discussing this in the doorway," he said, thankful to find something inessential to fixate on. "Does this place have anything resembling a bar? I'll go and get the drinks in whilst you put some clothes on. And don't even think about leaving via the fireplace. I think Marcus Flint's probably cursed it."

He turned in the doorway and went unsteadily back down the stairs. One forty. Twenty minutes, then, until he had to face the Dragon Lady, and twenty very unpleasant minutes he expected they would be.


	3. Fools To Make War

At least his father and Hermione had their clothes on now. That was something. Draco looked from Lucius' robes (tatty brown moleskin that looked as if they had previously belonged to some long-dead Malfoy Manor gamekeeper, possibly one who had loved them enough to be buried in them, and an even nastier brown velvet waistcoat with a pattern like a pub carpet) to Hermione's power-dressing jewellery to the fly-blown, beerily rounded window of the bar, and wondered how on earth even to begin this.

Lucius began for him. "You know, Draco," he said, his voice that deep-pile plush murmur that Draco had always meant to grow into a copy of and was rather glad now that he never had, "after a war, people become close to - ah - those with whom who they might never otherwise have come into contact. People who have shared the same experiences."

"The only experiences you've shared with her would be being tortured because the Dark Lord didn't have anything better to do on a rainy afternoon, and that still doesn't explain why you've been pretending to be mad for the past six years. Have you been sneaking out via the fireplace the whole time? And I thought _you_," he turned to Hermione, "were in love with Ron Weasley?"

"I am," said Hermione indignantly. She took a sip of her tonic water, which smelt slightly of hair-oil, and put the glass back on the table again with a little rejecting push. "I mean, of course I love Ron. It's just that we married so quickly - without having time to look around and see what else there was out there, really - and I just felt this urge to see whether there was something _more_..."

Draco had always loathed Ron, to the point where even knowing that Ron had played a part in saving his life didn't make him feel he was under any obligation to be _civil_ to him. He ought to be laughing his head off.

As it was, for some irritating reason he was assailed by a vision of the eighteen Bruthers - and heaven knew how many _other_ septs or chapters or whatever they called themselves, in other wizarding households - raising their goggle eyes to the skies and singing _Ronald Weasley Is Good And Kind_. It was just like the ungrateful flap-eared little berks to latch on to Ron for the one act of clearing them out of Hogwarts before they all got variously frozen, boiled, Transmogrified or reduced to vapour in the crossfire, when Hermione had been making a risible nuisance of herself for _years_ beforehand trying to work for their welfare, but still...

But still, Ron didn't deserve to be stuck in the middle of this. If only, Draco told himself firmly, because if Ron went off his head with grief or spite, the likelihood was strong that no one at Malfoy Manor would get so much as a shirt folded for them again, ever. Nor, for that matter, would they be able to take a walk in the grounds without running the risk of meeting Ron's unpleasantly muscular and rustic brother, probably armed with a pitchfork full of endangered dragon manure. It was pure self-interest to intercede on Ron's behalf. Really.

"Honestly, Granger, do you have to be so _predictable_?" he asked wearily. "_He_ \- " he indicated his father, who was leaning back in his chair with an irritating air of mastery of the situation, " - is another one of your _projects_, just like that ridiculous Hippogriff, or the house-elves, who, you may be glad to know, are raising their own and each others' consciousnesses like there's no tomorrow. You'll be handing out badges saying _Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Lucius Malfoy_ next."

"It's not like that at all!"

"It's exactly like that. And as for you, Father, if you dare tell me Narcissa doesn't understand you I may have to do something everyone between here and Gringotts will regret."

"Narcissa does understand me. That's the whole problem," said Lucius flatly. "The same way I understand her. I've loved her for twenty-five years. You don't get that far without spending a fair amount of it running interference against the other one's demons. But I don't _want_ someone who understands me. Not after Azkaban and the Dark Lord and all the things we had to do, she and I, just to keep you safe."

"What about the things _I_ had to do?"

"You'll notice it isn't just Narcissa I've been avoiding. When I look at you - when I even think the word _Draco_ \- I remember how, every time _he_ opened his mouth - "

" - if you can call that lipless thing a mouth - "

"- I hoped it would be me who drew his attention and not you. And he knew. He knew how it was for all of us."

Draco wanted to say _he didn't know me_, but it wouldn't have been true.

What he really hated was having to go through this in front of Hermione Weasley of all people. He wasn't _actually_ sure how much of his feelings were horror at seeing his parents' relationship crumble - that relationship that he'd always thought was as solid as the foundations of Malfoy Manor, and built on as many corpses - and how much was a creeping adolescent dread that the worlds of home and school were getting together to compare notes.

"Every time I look into your face - either of you -" Lucius was saying, his voice flat and battered like velvet left out in the rain, "I might as well be looking at a Dementor."

"You could have tried." Draco's voice came out sounding unpleasantly childish, whining and condemnatory; he was surprised his father answered at all, but he did.

"I tried until I went mad with it. And then, when I found I was no longer mad - "

"You decided to have a mid-life crisis instead?"

"_Are you going to tell Ron_?" Hermione interrupted urgently. "And Narcissa? Because there really isn't any need."

"When do I ever speak to Ron?" said Draco contemptuously.

"I care about him - "

"And I don't. Problem solved. Now, about my mother..."

"You'd be the one hurting her, if you told her," said Lucius. "Not us. All we're doing - Hermione and I - is trying to help each other to our feet."

"Most people trying to do _that_ don't start by lying down."

"You know exactly what I mean. The Dark Lord's reign left scars on us all. Scars which sent to places we'd never expected, on a quest to understand - "

"If you think the Skulk and Whistle is an unexpected place to find two people having an affair..."

"It seems to have surprised and unsettled _you_ quite considerably," observed his father.

"Too right it has!"

"_Draco_." Hermione put her hand out. He looked at the neat French manicure and the wedding ring, and thought bemusedly about the way that other peoples' lives had moved on, whilst his had remained - almost without his own volition - in a waiting pattern, waiting to breathe, waiting for courage, waiting to see whether he was forgiven. "None of this is _about_ Narcissa and Ron at all. The last thing either of us want to do is hurt them. If I tried to pretend I was happy just helping out at the Burrow and working for the Ministry and picking up the slack whilst Ginny's got such awful morning-sickness - I don't expect _you_ to understand - "

"What exactly about our previous acquaintance made you think I wouldn't understand an aversion to vomiting Weasleys?"

"I _am_ a Weasley, you -" Hermione's hand, half-consciously, twitched back towards her wand. Draco's did likewise. The barman gave way to a prolonged fit of tubercular coughing, and, when he had their full attention, pointed to a grubby sign on the bar which read _Duelling On The Premises Will Only Be Permitted To Persons Over The Age Of Three Hundred And Twelve, If Accompanied By Both Godparents And A Monoceros_. Once he was sure they'd received the message, the barman nodded politely and went back to wiping tankards, or at least giving the encrusted dirt on tankards and cloth some exercise. Hermione's hand fell back down at her side. Without looking, Lucius took it.

Draco had seen _that_ particular miniature ritual so often, between his parents, that he almost forgot to breathe. He wasn't sure he could have been more furious if Hermione had been wearing Narcissa's jewellery.

"I need something _more_," Hermione was saying, as if she thought he cared. "Something outside Ron, so that I can come back to him knowing I'm _me_, and not just part of the general Weasley scrum."

"You spent three good years scheming your Gryffindor scarf off to become part of that Weasley scrum."

"I was a _teenager_. People change. And people are marked."

This time, Draco was unable to stop himself. He looked at his father, who was drinking his Firewhiskey with an expression of patrician disgust. "You know exactly how _he_ was marked."

"I do." She looked at Lucius; Draco, expecting some kind of nauseating fondness, was surprised to see the sort of look pass between them that he'd occasionally seen whipping by just above his head between Crabbe and Goyle. Maybe spending two years being treated like an _almost_ disposable idiot by You-Know-Who and spending much of one's life being treated like a convenient source of historical facts and hexes by Harry Potter weren't so dissimilar after all. "It's part of what we have in common. Do you know, there are people in my department who were _thirteen_ when You-Know-Who was killed? In a couple of years' time, I'll be getting people who arrived at Hogwarts after Professor Snape was dead."

"I'd double-check their qualifications in Potions if I were you."

She smiled wryly. "Oh, believe me, I plan to. But it's all slipping away - turning into history - and I don't know what I'm supposed to do with the rest of my life. What do you do for an encore when you helped save the world at eighteen?"

"Apparently you shag retired Death Eaters. _Why didn't you tell Narcissa you were better_?" he demanded of Lucius, who was leaning back in his chair with his parchment-coloured eyelids shut over his hardly less pale eyes.

"Because I'm not," said his father. "And I don't know if I ever will be."

"Well, _I_ don't know what I'm going to do about this," said Draco flatly. "And I'm late for my appointment at the Ministry. Hermione, if you're opening your mouth to say _don't tell Narcissa_, you can save your breath. I owe more to her than I ever did to you." He choked back _and so does Harry Flaming Potter_: he'd always suspected her of carrying a torch for Harry, and saying anything about him wouldn't help.

She coloured. "_You_ haven't changed at all since you joined the Inquisitorial Squad. I was going to ask you who your appointment was with. I might be able to put a word in. And I _don't_ mean that as a bribe, before you say anything even more nasty."

"Ann Marlow."

"Oh, _her_." Hermione sniffed. "If they ever bring back the office of High Inquisitor, I'm going to strike her name off any list that comes past _my_ desk just on suspicion that she'll be far too good at the job."

"You never did like competition, did you?"

She looked reminiscent. "I never liked you. But I wouldn't have worked half so hard if I hadn't had you to catch up to."

"Grind into the ground, more like." He wasn't sure what he was doing; if it was trying to remind Lucius of the age difference between him and his inamorata, the old bastard would probably just take that as a feather in his cap. As he passed by his father's chair Lucius looked up at him. Draco felt as if he was seeing his own future in his father's bones; and his own past, too, the number of times he'd looked up at his father, trying to get his attention, trying to be good enough. He still hoped it hadn't all been for nothing.

"It all started because I wanted to apologise to her," said Lucius.

At least there was one thing the Malfoys shared only with each other; their ingrained habit of setting each other up for perfect exit lines. Draco left a handful of Knuts in the ashtray at the bar and paused, one hand on the door. "Next time? Apologise in writing."

It occurred to him on the way to the Ministry that standing up to Hermione had probably been a rather unwise move, particularly since she was well known for her ruthlessness under pressure and _he_ was well known - famous, in fact, or so he believed - for his lack of it. He was revolving this appalling thought in his mind as he entered the Ministry foyer, redecorated for the second time in any living wizard's lifetime. Draco wasn't especially struck on the new decor, which ran to improving multiethnic murals, but considering what it had replaced, anything up to and including hoardings covered in Neo-Grindelwaldian graffiti would have been an improvement.

"Draco Malfoy? It is Draco, isn't it?"

And he'd almost made it to the lifts without being noticed. Cursing inwardly, he turned to be confronted by a slender, smiling, excessively stylish witch, in a small daring hat perched so precipitously on one side of her brown hair that he thought it was probably charmed on, and with a general air of knowing how to wear clothes well. She was smiling hopefully.

His brain, working its slow maze-route to her name, gave him serially several glimpses of Quidditch matches, all cold cloudy sky from odd angles and scudding figures in blue and green robes making shapes in the wind; a conversation overheard between some Ravenclaws and duly reported by Crabbe in case it was something to do with the Chamber of Secrets which revolved around the words _bore_ and _ankle_ and _match_, and finally a positive identification. "Lois Sanger," he said; without much enthusiasm, but at least without the downward sliding of spirits that would have come of being hailed by that spiv Corner, or that awful Luna Lovegood person.

"This really is a bit of luck for me," she said, smiling in an open, almost vulnerable way that made much of the good side of her profile. If he hadn't grown up around Narcissa, he might have been taken in. "I'm writing a biography of Harry Potter..."

"Then why don't you talk to him?"

Her face flamed; she didn't like approaching strangers, evidently, and it made him wonder why on earth she had gone into this outskirt of journalism. "As a former master of the Deathstick..."

Draco felt his entire body tense. Somehow, despite this, his legs kept walking. "I _don't_ want to talk about it, Miss Sanger."

"Could you at least fill me in on what you've been doing for the last few years?"

"Helping my father with his memoirs," said Draco with considerable bitterness, and escaped sideways into the lift. "The very best of luck with your biography, Miss Sanger. Goodbye."

The last he saw of her face, it looked like the more interesting kind of family portrait; as if she were doing a lot of very sharp calculations behind the pleasing, porcelain surface. He felt rather less sorry for his rudeness than he had earlier. The lift took him downwards, finally depositing him in the Department of Mysteries.

He could see what Flint had meant about Ann Marlow's office. Not that it showed any sign of Umbridgean frilly femininity. Quite the reverse. It was almost intimidatingly plain and tidy, with no decoration beyond a silver-framed family portrait over the fireplace and an unassuming carved wooden Celtic cross over the door. Draco felt his skin chill and wasn't sure why. Possibly it was the way everyone in the family portrait appeared to be ignoring both the Ann in the portrait and the Ann at the desk. The Ann at the desk was wearing a blue suit again, this one grey-blue and with something of the Mother Superior about it.

"Madam Marlow?" he began politely. "I have an appointment..."

"Oh - yes - of course - I'm terribly sorry, I was expecting your mother, but of _course_ she can't leave your father, I should have..."

_Leave his father_? Draco drew his shoulders back as if he had been slapped in the face. He looked down his straight nose at her with all possible Malfoy hauteur. "What on _earth_ do you mean, Madam Marlow?"

A small blush rose in her cheeks. She took back the hand she had been offering to shake with him. "Oh, I am so sorry! Has your father - "

"Perhaps it would be better if you told me what you were _expecting_ to hear about my father?"

"We only ever seem to meet at funerals or - well - I am so very sorry," she said again, taking refuge in formality, and not, as so many people would have done, looking stupid or insincere. "Was it sudden?"

_Suddenly, in the library_... Draco's brain made up headlines; realised what she'd meant; and collapsed into realisation of what a colossal faux pas he'd just made. "I think we're talking at cross-purposes," he said carefully. The only good thing to be said about having sold one's soul at the age of sixteen out of a combination of self-delusion, boredom and pique was that it did seem to make future mistakes appear much more manageable. "You _weren't_ telling me you knew about my father's affair with Hermione Weasley?"

Ann sat down rather suddenly in the chair behind her empty desk and looked horrified. "Oh, no, I'm _sure_ not. People must have been spreading nasty rumours - there's a form I can file for surveillance of your local owl network - "

"Thank you very much, but I assure you it wouldn't do any good. They admitted it themselves."

"The poor things," said Ann. "They must be so _unhappy_."

"They were when I left them, yes," said Draco caustically. "Though I think that was because they weren't sure whether I was going to tell Ron."

Ann looked comprehensively shocked. "You mean _how_ you were going to tell Ron."

"No, I'm fairly certain I mean _whether._"

"But surely he's got a right to know..."

"I think it could be argued that he's got a right not to have to hear it from me."

"I do see that," said Ann painstakingly. "But - well - it's a matter of what's _right_ \- "

That caught him on a nerve. A nerve which had been exposed eight years before, and which the Dark Lord had taken great delight in plucking whenever it pleased him thereafter. "Like that unfortunate child who'll be going to Hogwarts next year with a letter saying _put him in Slytherin and don't give him an even break thereafter, his father might be a Neo-Grindelwaldian?_" said Draco with nasty politeness. "You may as well just quietly heave him out of the boat half-way across the Hogwarts lake and have done with it. In fact, if the Ministry had had the courage of its bizarrely Lamarckian convictions the _last_ time it came to an inmate of a Muggle orphanage with a spotty family record..."

"Are you talking about Edward Oeschli?"

"If he's the cuckoo-clock kid Marcus Flint was talking about, then yes, I am."

"I wouldn't go round believing all you hear from Marcus Flint," said Ann pinkly, but with the edge of a snap in her voice.

"Why not? Everything else he's told me today has been _painfully_ accurate!"

"He shouldn't have been revealing privileged Ministry information, and in any case, the situations are _entirely_ different! There isn't a child involved here. Or, at least - no one's _registered_ \- "

"As far as I know, no, there isn't, and thank sweet Merlin for that. Though if it does turn out there's some toddling mite out there with the Malfoy family jaw and the Granger teeth, I'm going to make everyone concerned sign an agreement that the estate is most certainly not responsible for any Muggle orthodontic work."

"There can't be," said Ann in a practical, reviving tone of voice. "I see Hermione every week or so. Everyone would have noticed if she was - "

"Vomiting into every available cistern and flower-pot like Ginny Potter?"

Ann looked more blushingly taken aback than he'd expected, which made him feel embarrassed in turn at embarrassing her. Anyone would think he was a Weasley himself, forever making boorish jokes. "I'm very sorry," he said formally. "This really isn't something I should have troubled you with. I came here to talk about the war orphans."

"Is your mother looking forward to seeing them?" she asked.

Draco looked at her carefully to see whether she was serious. Apparently she was. He wondered what it must be like to have that kind of dementedly, unshakeably positive view of the universe. The only other person he'd met with an outlook _that_ squint to reality, or anything _like_ that degree of faith that one's own viewpoint was not only proper but _inevitable_...

He remembered Flint's words on the train. _It's a damn good thing she wasn't on the Dark Lord's side. We'd have won._

"Not _as such_," he said carefully. "With the situation as it is between my mother and father - and my father's mental health being so unstable - and none of us wanting to put an extra burden on the house-elves," extra burden, hah, they'd have the orphans singing_ Ronald Weasley Is Good And Kind_ and washing up after their own breakfast within a day and a half, "we just don't feel we can open the Manor to strangers at present. Mother suggested that, instead, the war orphans might like to each have a wish from the Wishing Rock. It only works for the pure in heart," he added rather ruefully. "Or possibly you have to have the purest of intentions _when you're wishing on it_, I can't remember. That's why we didn't finish the War eight years ago by saying _I wish Lord Voldemort would win_. Still, I'm sure that won't be a problem for your war-orphans."

Ann began, vaguely, to unwrap Bruther's careful work. "It is a shame you don't feel you can make room for them at the Manor," she said. "They will be disappointed."

_Yes, for as long as it takes the sharpest one to say, I wish I had a lovely holiday at Malfoy Manor_, Draco thought, and wished he or Narcissa had thought of that earlier. Still, with luck the orphans would all reject the idea in favour of something more interesting. He imagined them bouncing on Kingsley Shacklebolt's knee in the name of Spending A Day With The Minister, or howling and spilling ice-creams all over Gringotts, and began to feel slightly better. "My father's mental health really has been very precarious," he said, trying to convince himself as much as Ann. "I don't think he _or_ Hermione would be behaving this way if it wasn't for the War, and the aftermath..."

"We did send Mr Malfoy an invitation to join a support group for rehabilitated minions of the Dark Lord. I don't think he ever replied."

"We're not sure how much of his post he opens. And Narcissa's really very busy with - " He tried to think what Narcissa might be reasonably busy with. " - with trying to keep the estate going." _And the family line._ Not with Romilda Vane, though, not whilst he had breath in his body, and certainly not with Violanthe Gamp or Cunegund Crabbe. "I wish it could all be different, but - "

"I wish it could too," she said, looking at him with absolute sincerity.

He realised, too late, where her hand was resting, realised the significance of the pile of papers and ribbons and string, half-heeded on the desk. "You really don't want to say things like that whilst you're touching the Wishing Rock - " he began desperately.

Time and magic rushed towards them; bore them away; rushed past them; and were still.


	4. Some Day We'll Return

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This and subsequent chapters owe a great debt to the works of Georgette Heyer.

_A Hundred And Ninety-Three Years Earlier_

When Draco opened his eyes again, he was standing in the cabbage patch in the kitchen garden of Malfoy Manor, and a house-elf which looked as if it had been assembled from the skin on an elderly gardener's elbows was pointing at him with one twiggy finger whilst supporting itself on a spade nearly as tall as it was. "Fetch!" it enunciated in tones of horror.

Draco knew that Malfoy Manor's commune of house-elves were a little eccentric, but he hadn't been aware that they'd progressed to a complete reversal of roles between elf and master. "Fetch what?"

The pointing finger quivered. "Fetch!" the house-elf gibbered again. "Spectre! Apparition! Away with you! Truckle is knowing that the young master is lying ill in his bedchamber, but Truckle is not thinking that the young master is on his deathbed, no, not yet, or Truckle would be busy tying black crepe around all these cabbages, yes, indeed, Truckle would!"

"Your name's Truckle?" Draco ventured. "Not Bruther?"

"What kind of name is _Bruther_ for a house-elf?" said Truckle scornfully. "Truckle is knowing that you are a malicious doppelganger and not the young master, because the young master has the spattergroit, or else he would be in London for the Season, all parades and drums and prize-fights and nasty unsafe broom-races, yes, most certainly! And finding a young lady at one of those balls at Belby's Ascending Assembly Rooms, no doubt, to carry on the line," he added in a weirdly incantatory mutter which caused one of the cabbages to sprout alarmingly under Draco's feet and nearly made him lose his balance, "since he failed to fix his interest with that nice Miss Thomas with all the Galleons from those sugar plantations, and her the Minister for Magic's own niece too, which ought to silence the nasty chattering tongues of people saying she and her father ran that plantation on zombie labour."

"Thomas?" said Draco blankly, envisaging Dean Thomas posing with one hand on his hip in a skin-tight Muggle frock, which was, on the whole, slightly more disturbing than even the cabbages.

"Miss Thomas, yes, didn't Truckle just tell you so, you foul ensanguined haunt, you! A fine young woman, to be sure, and Mr Draco would have carried her off too, hand, heart, wand and waistcoat, if Mr Furnivall hadn't let off those Dungbombs in the best parlour, what a scamp he is, to be sure. Not that Truckle would have a pack of nasty, slothful, harum-scarum zombies in _his_ garden, no..."

Of all of that, _carry on the line_ was the only part that made any sense to Draco. He didn't _remember_ a Miss Thomas who was related to the Shacklebolts, but that didn't mean there wasn't one. Very likely she was blamelessly preparing for her NEWTs and had never heard of him. He did wish that Narcissa would stop trying to fix him up with younger women. "Well, I'll be - ghosting along then, Truckle. Very well noticed. I see there's no fooling you. And, er, very fine cabbages there," he said, and left the cabbage patch before there were any more upheavals under his feet. "Good work."

"Truckle is thanking you kindly, you nasty ectoplasmic thing, you," said Truckle indulgently. Draco stepped over a row of what he thought might be radishes and made for the safer territory of the lawns and the Manor.

At least - _was_ it the Manor? The back looked wrong. The gardens looked wrong, too, though more subtly so. Draco pivoted on his heels, taking stock. There was the familiar path, coming up from the orchard and the churchyard beyond. It climbed up past terraced lawns and through knot-garden;  
paced, cat-like solemn, along the wall where the Dirigible Plums eked out an irritable clambering existence; parted in two to circle the fountain; and made a final graceful ascent up to the very familiar solid iron-studded oak back door. However, the door itself was painted an elderly, silvery green, and not the black that Draco definitely remembered from that morning; the small sign reading _No Entry To The Public_ was missing, and so was the elegant and completely non-functional facsimile of a Muggle burglar alarm.

More than that. The wall into which the door was set was the same golden sun-weathered brick, but the ivy that wreathed it only reached half-way to Narcissa's balcony, rather than having to be discouraged, every spring and summer, from colonising the roof. More importantly still, the entirety of the Victorian stable-block on one side and the misconceived but devastatingly beautiful Thirties elegance of Abraxas Malfoy's observatory and planetarium on the other were missing. In their place stood a spinney of evergreen trees, dark against the papery autumn sky, and a scatter of down-at-heel buildings around large open stableyard, respectively.

Draco fell prey to horrible suspicions. He looked down at himself. That morning, he had put on his best dark grey satin robes, and added a black broadcloth cloak with a fancy green lining in case of rain. The cloak was much the same in essentials. The lining was an even more impressive brocade than it had been earlier, trimmed with knots of silver-gilt ribbon, and the shoulders were ornamented with a large number of capes. All in all, it was a wonder Truckle had mistaken him for a ghost instead of going straight for assuming he was a passing Gilderoy Lockhart impersonator down on his luck.

The robes were a different story. Instead of reaching decently to his ankles, they were as short as Quidditch strip and so alarmingly tight across the shoulders that he wasn't sure how he'd got into them in the first place. Underneath them, he seemed to be wearing black knee-breeches and a white cambric shirt with a cravat.

The tightness in his throat _wasn't_ his old, familiar friend, the sense of panic. Instead, it seemed to be some kind of starched neck-brace. Draco turned his head from side to side, to the total bemusement of another house-elf going by with a pailful of apples, and finally worked out that it was _not_ a neck-brace but merely a very high pointed collar of the sort he'd seen in family portraits and always thought would do a good job of setting off his cheekbones.

Someone had kidnapped him, dressed him up, and _abandoned him in a cabbage-bed_? At least, he thought, they probably hadn't ravished him and taken incriminating pictures; he didn't know anyone who was depraved enough to do that _and_ organised enough to dress him again afterwards, except possibly Exquisabeth Zabini, and he didn't think he was her type. Not particularly reassured, he examined the pockets of the robes.

At least he still had his wand. That was something. He also had a quantity of small items dangling from a watch-chain at his narrow waist. The only one whose function he even dimly recognised was a Remembrall, which winked and spun at him frantically. He bounced it in his hand, but whatever he was supposed to be remembering failed to surface.

Well, onward and upward. To his own bedroom, for preference, to see exactly who was up there claiming to have the spattergroit. He let himself in through the back door, his hand reassured out of trembling at the last moment by the utterly familiar shape of the iron serpent knocker.

The corridor was dim and cool, giving its usual impression of being slightly submerged, the result of high windows and sea-grey stone walls. The floors were the familiar flagstones. _Did_ they look newer? Impossible to tell.

A girl in a long brown dress emerged from the scullery. She curtsied. Draco wondered how he should go about starting a conversation. The dress, and the rough apron over the top of it, not to mention the rather fetching mob-cap, said _servant_, and the Malfoys hadn't employed human servants since the Muggle employment laws grew so intrusive in the 1940s.

He felt vaguely as if his feet were floating above the ground. He checked his feet for high heels and was relieved to find that he was wearing perfectly respectable tasseled boots. It was probably just shock. Not just the flashy shock of realising that the Wishing Rock had landed him and presumably also Ann Marlow (who he ought to go about finding, pronto) in the past; the slow-burning shock of realising what Lucius had been doing. He'd thought, after seeing the way the Dark Lord treated Lucius - without any of the honours that they had all expected, without even _respect_ \- that he would never be shocked again, ever, by anything to do with his father. He was wrong.

The girl refrained so valiantly from staring at him that he wondered whether _he_ had contracted the spattergroit. Finally, she plunged into another curtsey, and then flung herself back into the scullery like a retracting Extendable Ear. There was the sound of alarmed, excited voices, female, then youngish male, then female again and apparently excitably French, then male and middle-aged and possessed of all the gravitas of a solid oak coffin lid. Footsteps, equally solid, made a procession of themselves out into the scullery, and a rotund man in opulently plain dark grey robes and a plush stovepipe hat was bowing in front of Draco.

"Are you quite well, Mr Draco, sir? Would you care for a glass of Butterbeer to drink to your most welcome recovery? And on the occasion of that recovery, may I extend the congratulations and good wishes of all of the staff?"

Draco thought on his feet. "Don't extend them yet, er - "

"_Yaxley_, sir," intoned Yaxley. His butler? Evidently, yes, his butler. Or, rather, his ancestor's butler. _That_ Draco Malfoy. The one who must have survived an attack of the spattergroit in his early twenties, because at thirty-one he embarked on the whirlwind courtship of the duchess who brought into the family a certain strain of loucheness and, of course, the Strawberry Bed.

Draco couldn't remember much else about his ancestor's history, except that he had expired of an apoplexy at the age of a hundred and forty-eight during an argument with his great-grandson Abraxas about where to store the giant Lunascope until it could be installed in the planetarium. From what he remembered of the portraits of his ancestor painted somewhat before that date, the resemblance was close enough that he might pass, particularly once he found a mirror and adjusted his sideburns and hair.

Yaxley was looking somewhat concerned, which was unsurprising. However drunken and fast-living Draco's ancestor might be, Draco somehow doubted that he regularly forgot the name of his own butler. Or possibly he regarded the staff with such lordly disdain that Yaxley was surprised to be addressed with anything other than a kick in the backside or a well-placed curse. Draco considered whether he could play drunk, and decided that it was, at present, completely outside his powers. But he had to say _something_, and preferably before his spattergroited predecessor came roaring down the stairs modelling a selection of Regency bedwear...

"I'm practicing Bilocating," he informed Yaxley grandly. "Please tell the staff not to be concerned if they see two of me."

"The staff will be delighted to rise to any occasion," Yaxley assured him smoothly. "To any _Family_ occasion, at any rate. I would ask the favour of a consultation in the State Offices concerning the hiring of extra staff and possibly the erection of Blood Lines around some of the more fragile family monuments and relics, should you decide to extend your hospitality once again to your _maternal_ cousin Mr Furnivall."

Furnivall? Oh, yes, Truckle had said something about a Furnivall, in the context - Draco thought - of Dungbombs. A wizarding family which had since died out, Draco presumed. He suffered himself to be chivvied gently by Yaxley into the front hall, which was evidently a more suitable place for one of the Family to be than the corridor between the scullery and the gardener's pantry.

It was much as he remembered it. The air smelt of dust and beeswax. The standards hanging over the stairs were fractionally less tattered, the wooden panelling was painted with garlands of frail gold stars which twinkled as he looked at them, and the French-legged table on which Narcissa was wont to leave her copy of the _Daily Prophet_, a vase of roses and her gardening gloves was, instead, covered in a careless tangle of caped coats, fishing-rods, broomsticks, and something Draco at first _took_ for a broomstick before realising that it was instead an old-fashioned, shoulder-mounted fowling wand with a trumpet mouth.

"Your father's, sir, as you remember," said Yaxley, patting the fowling wand with proprietary interest. "I wonder whether, now you are recovered, I might have your authorisation to strip and clean it? It goes very hard with me to see it lying there untended. Twenty-seven inches, braided unicorn hair and harpy heartstring. Mr Lesath always said that an Impediment Curse from that could drop an entire flock of ducks from half a mile off."

"You can take it out in the East Acre and shoot dragons with it for all I care," said Draco absently.

"Dragons? Oh, no, not at _this_ time of year, sir. Mr Lesath wouldn't dream of shooting a dragon out of season."

_Mr Lesath_. Draco repressed a shudder. He only knew Lesath Malfoy as a portrait that was wont to express itself in fluent eighteenth-century abuse towards anyone who used the back stairs. He had absolutely no wish to actually meet him. "I think it must be a side-effect of Bilocating, but I feel like someone just hit me with a Memory Charm," Draco improvised, rubbing his left temple. "Ah - where _is_ my noble father?"

Yaxley looked downright paternal, though Draco thought it was probably directed at the polished stock of the fowling wand rather than at him. "Mr Lesath is, very sadly, absent from the Manor at present, on a diplomatic mission for the Ministry in the outer reaches of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The effort of Bilocation has clearly tired you, sir. May I suggest that you retire to bed and re-acquaint yourself with - ah - yourself? I shall have one of the still-room staff send up a strengthening tisane."

Draco tried to imagine what Lesath Malfoy might be doing in the Austrian Empire and decided that it was probably either spying or werewolf-hunting or both, and in either case unlikely to become his business. Yaxley rocked backwards on his neat, surprisingly small polished boots, looked gently pleased with himself and his surroundings, and summoned a footman apparently by force of personality. The footman was wearing green and silver livery and a profoundly stupid wig, and looked rather like Oliver Wood. He bowed and took Draco's cloak. Another footman presented himself with a tray of wax-sealed missives, one of which looked disturbingly like a Howler. It was addressed in feminine handwriting by someone who couldn't spell Malfoy, and was bouncing up and down emitting steam.

"That would, I believe, be from your esteemed aunt, Lady Gamp, enquiring as to your attendance at her Ball to announce the candidacy of her protégé Mr Grogan Stump for the post of Minister for Magic. And, of course, the passing of the Regency Act among the Muggles," added Yaxley indulgently. "Perhaps you would like to rejoin yourself and open it in private."

"Perhaps I should," said Draco, eyeing Lady Gamp's missive without enthusiasm. If that was a sample of her ancestresses, he was most _certainly_ not marrying Violanthe Gamp. Or any of Narcissa's other choices, either. For some reason that reminded him that he still hadn't seen anything of Ann Marlow. Possibly her wish had just transported _him_ back in time and left her staring rather perplexedly at her now noticeably Malfoy-free office, but it was worth making sure.

And weren't the Marlows Muggleborn? Or at least as near to it as damn it, with only one wizarding grandparent? If she'd landed up in a scullery whilst he'd fallen into the role of the Young Master, she would probably never forgive him. And then the Ministry would scupper and countercurse _any_ chances he had of extricating Narcissa more or less unharmed from the horrible situation they'd left behind in the early twenty-first century, and the Manor would end up as a play-centre for war orphans whilst the Family gibbered, cackled and lay gently quivering respectively in separate wards at St. Mungo's...

"Have we taken on any female staff lately, Yaxley?" he enquired. "Any _new_ female staff? Er - blonde ones?"

Yaxley drew himself up to his full height, which was not quite as impressive as his full girth. "Certainly not, Mr Draco. I believe you were present when your noble father expressed himself in the strongest possible terms concerning his wish that you should marry well, and spoke of his disinclination to in any way countenance your distraction from that endeavour during the time of his absence. If you recall, sir, it was on the evening when Mr Furnivall broke a chamberpot over the head of the Bishop of Salisbury."

_Ah_. "If you could remind me where my bedroom - "

"The Chinese Room, sir. At the front of the house on the third floor, directly above the Court Apartments and the Saloon."

For some reason, Draco had been expecting that his eighteenth-century namesake would have _his_ bedroom, which was a floor lower down and had been created when Abraxas decided that he was never going to entertain royalty again and that the Court Apartments should therefore be turned into bedrooms with commodious bathrooms. The Chinese Room, when he got there (followed by the footman and his tray, upon which Aunt Gamp's missive was hissing balefully) turned out to be the boxroom where the house-elves folded sheets. Suffering from a state of mental indigestion, he murmured the strongest anti-Spattergroit Charm he could think of to himself and opened the door.

His ancestor was sitting up in bed, wearing a dressing-gown rather unnecessarily ornamented with stars, moons and peacocks. There was a definite resemblance, despite the spots with which his ancestor was embellished almost as lavishly as the dressing-gown. Draco wondered whether his own jaw looked that weaselly, and whether he customarily had that sour, superior expression. If he did, it would explain a lot about Potter. Aunt Gamp's letter let out an alarming, steam-engine whistle. Draco took the tray neatly from the footman and shut the door just as the Howler went off.

He was expecting an overwrought contralto voice with overtones of his Aunt Bellatrix. Instead, what escaped from the Howler was a horrible, syrupy whisper.

"_Dway_-co, darwing! How does 'oo? Just as 'oo does, so does little I, all alone, and _no_ news of whether 'oo pwan to come to my ickle-tiny party..."

The Draco by the door cringed. The Draco in the bed cringed worse, having had, Draco supposed, a lifetime of this kind of thing. When the letter sighed away to a final dying whisper and a pile of ashes, the Draco in the bed shook his Spattergroited head.

"If I do show up at her wretched party, she'll sigh and call me 'oo, and bwame me - sorry, I mean _blame_ me for giving her guests the spattergroit," he said moodily, and, Draco was fascinated to notice, in something more closely resembling a Wiltshire accent than the cut-glass tones that the Family went in for in the present day, "and if I don't, she'll go and have a fit of the sentiments all over Father. Is that you Polyjuiced to look like me, Furnivall? If it is, I warn you, I ain't paying any more of your debts."

"I'm not your cousin Furnivall, I'm your great-great-grandson Draco." Draco frowned. "That doesn't sound like half enough generations, but we're a long-lived line."

"Oh. Time-Turner, was it? Didn't know the Family had one." Draco's ancestor looked pensive. "Don't know where it might be _now_, do you? Could use it to pop back in time and have a word with Furnivall before he dishes me with that heiress. Fine figure of a woman, but no sense of humour. The ladies - God bless 'em! - don't, I've noticed, particularly when it comes to Dungbombs." His expression changed to positive alarm. "I say! Don't tell me you've come to tell me you're my great-grandson _out of_ the Thomas filly, and if I don't win her back..."

"Nothing like that," Draco assured him. "Anyway, it wasn't a Time-Turner. It was the Wishing Rock."

His ancestor blinked at him. "So you want to find it and wish y'self back again?" he asked almost intelligently. "Be my guest. Anything else you need to get yourself back on your way? Not that you ain't _welcome_ \- in the ordinary way, I'd be mullin' the Butterbeer in the festive punchbowl, offering you a hand or two of cards, lookin' through the old stud-book together, and so on - but m'father only pays me enough of an allowance to support _one_ of me, and it's deuced tight, even so. Might have had to rusticate even if I hadn't caught the spattergroit."

Draco had hoped for a productive session of conferring with someone whose brain worked exactly like his. Evidently it was not to be. On the strength of their conversation so far, he wasn't absolutely sure whether his ancestor's brain worked at all. He did seem to remember that Lesath Malfoy had married a Goyle. "It wasn't me who did the wishing," he said. "It was someone else. She..."

"_She_, ho ho!" Draco-in-the-bed heaved himself up against his somewhat ointment-stained pillows. "Barque of frailty, is it?"

"Nothing like it," said Draco crisply.

His ancestor leered archly. "Suppose not, what with needin' to be pure in heart and all, though I used to know this French piece, dancer she was, lived up Immuir Alley... Immuir Alley still going strong, I suppose?"

"No, they built a bank on it," said Draco, who had no idea where Immuir Alley might have been but just wanted his ancestor to be distracted. It was not to be. The Draco in the bed beamed roguishly. "Never mind my bits of muslin, we were talking of yours. Or rather, a lady who's _not_ a piece of muslin. Your intended?"

"Let's just say a lady who I would be unwise to upset."

"Oh." His ancestor tapped a finger wisely against his blemished nose. "A lady you'd _like_ to make your intended. Rich, is she?"

Draco looked around for a way out of this conversation. "Influential," he temporised. "Look, we were in London when she wished on the Rock, she might have fetched up there, I suppose. Why don't I - I can't believe I'm saying this, but never mind - why don't I go along to your aunt Lady Gamp's ball and pretend to be you, and in return, you tell me what I need to know so that she doesn't have the footmen throw me out in the street on suspicion of being a Polyjuiced impostor? You'd better give me the rest of your allowance, too, or at least tell me where I can borrow against it."

"And what am _I_ supposed to live off for the remainder of the quarter?"

"Blackmail Yaxley. Tell him you saw him out shooting ducks with your father's fowling wand."

The Draco in the bed looked appalled. "Can't go blackmailin' your own _butler_, man! What kind of future d'ye _come_ from?"

"One where my staff are all models of rectitude. I'll tell you about them sometime."

His ancestor looked cunning. "Couldn't _you_ pop forward a week or two, see who's going to win the Newmarket broom-races..."

"No, I couldn't. I told you, it was someone else who did the wishing. I don't even know where the Wishing Rock is now."

"It's in m'father's study," said the Draco in the bed, in a tone of voice that had even less truck with temporal paradoxes than Lesath Malfoy and his butler had with the moral rights of ducks. "We could wish for next month's _Racing Calendar_."

"We could, if you count yourself pure in heart. I'm sure I don't."

The Draco in the bed conceded that point. "Well, don't wade more than two hundred pounds into the River Tick, because I'm not good for it," he grumbled, "and everyone _knows_ I'm not worth it, because of m'father going off to turn the Hapsburgs against the Wizard Emperor, or whatever it is he's doing out there, and not being around to tow me out. Not that he would, anyhow. Keeps me deuced short." He glared at Draco. The glare was only worsened by the large boil on one of his eyelids. It reminded Draco horribly of Mad-Eye Moody. "You'd better turn my aunt up sweet, mind. D'ye want my wand?"

Draco shuddered. "_No_. I've had enough of adventures in wand transferral to last me a lifetime."

"You don't mean you're a molly? If you are, you can damn well keep your breeches buttoned whilst you're claiming to be me. I don't want a reputation."

_Old Wizarding attitudes_, Draco thought, _how lovely_. "Believe me, I have no inclinations in that direction."

"Good thing too. Sacred duty to carry on the Line."

"You sound just like Mother." Draco sat down on the bed. "Now - where do you - I? live? And am I going to end up being responsible for this Furnivall person?"

His ancestor grunted contentedly and leaned back against the pillows. "You know, m'boy, I should think it's an absolute certainty."


	5. Different Worlds

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter owes a great debt to the works of Georgette Heyer. Also, one scene draws inspiration from Diana Wynne Jones' _Archer's Goon_.

Ann was in a carriage. It was not a very comfortable carriage. It didn't help that she was wearing a corset that seemed to be doing its very best to impede her digestion of a meal that she didn't remember eating, and that she was sitting with her back to... some things that, from the speed of their padding gait, probably weren't horses. Bewildered, she looked down at the Wishing Rock.

"What is that you have there, Miss Marlow?" asked a girlish voice that reminded her horribly, in its self-assurance, of the sort of friends Rowan always used to bring home.

Ann looked up. Sitting facing her were two young witches dressed in muslin robes with waists approximately around their armpits. Ann looked down at her own knees. _She_ was wearing muslin, too. She blushed. Even she, practically Muggleborn, and having spent her childhood and school holidays in sensible skirts and jumpers, knew that muslin wasn't a proper robing material. Velvet, or suiting, or brocade, or loose-woven silk for summer; but _certainly_ not something you could practically see your own legs through.

"Are you quite _well_, Miss Marlow?" persisted the young woman opposite.

"I don't know what any of this is about," said Ann, firmly but politely, "but I don't have time to participate in the Random Spell Testing Programme, or whatever this is, at present. I need to get back to the Ministry. I have a meeting to review the process of the Unspeakable Recruitment Board at three, and an appointment with the Minister at half-past four, not to mention the Knight Bus Steering Committee and the Working Group on Temporal Rearrangement..."

The girl gave a high sharp giggle. She had soft brown hair and a wet pink mouth. The other witch had a quantity of shiny dark ringlets, and was staring dismissively out of the window. "But Miss Marlow, you speak as if _you_ work at the Ministry! Have you become a campaigner for witches' rights like Miss Lufkin? I think my aunt would have something to say about that!"

Ann's brain jumped sharply to the panelled reading room off the Minister's office, which was - _presided over_ was the only possible word, or rather two words, Ann painstakingly corrected herself - by a portrait of a very stately witch in robes rather like the ones Ann herself was wearing now and a hairdo like an alarmingly Grecian teapot. _Artemisia Lufkin, 1754-1825, Minister for Magic 1798-1811_...

_Oh_. She could see what had happened. "I suppose this is all Temporal Rearrangement's fault," said Ann. "Now, it may be convenient for _you_ to hold a meeting in the early 1800s, young lady, but by _my_ personal timeline it's only ten past two in the afternoon and I'm not supposed to be meeting you until six. I know your department is doing sterling work in these years, countering attempts by agents of the so-called Wizard Emperor to transport Restricted Substances and modern-day Charms back and forth across the time-streams, so there isn't any need for you to give me the _do you want to wake up one morning to find the Leaky Cauldron serving frogs legs_ speech. Just drop me off back in my meeting with Draco Malfoy and we'll say no more about it."

The brown-haired girl opened her eyes wide. "Draco Malfoy? My _cousin_ Draco Malfoy? Why, Miss Marlow, whatever should he have to say to you?"

Ann's mind seemed curiously hazy about that. She remembered... _oh_. He had come to offer the Ministry the Malfoy Wishing Rock in lieu of opening his house to war-orphans. Ann thought that was rather a kind gesture, though she'd never really understood why people who couldn't comply with the Ministry's perfectly reasonable requests always seemed so eager to _bargain_ about it. Surely either one did one's best, or explained why one couldn't, and that was that. And she had... oh dear. Ann tucked the Wishing Rock hastily away in the small embroidered drawstring handbag that seemed to come as part of her outfit.

_I wish it could all be different_, he'd said. And she'd said _I wish it could_.

Apparently the Wishing Rock had interpreted that as a request that she should be dropped off in the middle of one of the major hotspots for Temporal Rearrangement's activities. She supposed she should be thankful that it wasn't 1940s Europe with bombs and curses exploding on every corner. The Regency might be crawling with agents of the Wizard Emperor, but at least it seemed relatively civilised and quiet.

"I think your governess has gone mad, Anemone," said the dark-haired girl in an unpleasant drawl. "Did you Confund her or something?"

"I didn't do _anything_, and she's _not_ my governess, Sacharissa, she's a poor relation," said Anemone. She gave Ann a resentful little look up under her wet-looking lashes. "I hope she _doesn't_ go mad, or Mother will have to send her to St. Mungo's and take Aunt Hornby back as a companion, and she and Aunt Hornby never suited. _Are you quite well, Miss Marlow?_" This last was directed to Ann, in a loud slow voice that reminded Ann of the Department of International Magical Co-Operation on the frequent occasions when the allegedly permanent translation spells were down for maintenance. "Would you care for my French vinaigrette?"

If Ann had been back at the Ministry, she would probably have said _Will you both please be quiet, I'm trying to think_, but for some reason having been pitchforked into the early nineteenth century seemed to have knocked down all the barriers she had set up against her natural state of low-level flusterment in unfamiliar social situations. She meekly took the vinaigrette. It was a nasty-smelling little bottle.

"'Ow do you feel?" demanded the bottle in a nasal French accent. "Faint? Dizzy? Are you under ze impression that you are a fairy-cake, or ze Wizard Emperor Gustave Madmarengo?"

Ann returned a startled negative. The vinaigrette reached out a small glass arm and flipped its lid back on. "She eez fine. Just putting it on," it informed Anemone. "'Ow sad eet eez when ze poor relations take to giving zemselves airs."

Sacharissa gave Ann a look that even Rowan couldn't have bettered; a toxic cordial of _My God, you are so below my notice_ and _Why are you intruding yourself on my attention again_? At nineteen, possibly even at twenty-one, Ann would have quivered. As it was, she was twenty-eight. She smiled. Kindly.

Sacharissa looked down her high-bridged nose with an expression of total astonishment, and then hunched up her shoulder and turned to Anemone, plainly intending to cut Ann out of the conversation. "Will you marry your cousin Draco, do you think?"

Anemone fiddled with the pale blue ribbon that held back her soft curls and looked distinctly unenthused at the prospect. "I _suppose_. If nothing better comes along. _Mother_ says that if I married him I'd have a carriage, but what's the use of having a carriage if you're stuck out at Malfoy Manor and there's nowhere to drive it but round and round the park? It's all very well for _men_, they can go anywhere they like with the Floo Turnpike."

"He's got Floo installed at Malfoy Manor?" Sacharissa looked unwillingly impressed.

"Oh, yes, everything's very modern. And even if they weren't paid-up members of the Floo Turnpike Trust, I suppose he might Apparate to London, or take out one of those little sporting flying carpets, or anything else he liked. And there _I_ would be, stuck there with Uncle Abraxas glowering at me over breakfast and a litter of Malfoy children all looking exactly like white mice."

Sacharissa yawned. "Your cousin has a fine establishment, but one can't deny he's far too pale. I've never liked milky-looking men."

_Milky-looking_? thought Ann indignantly. They'd clearly never looked at him. Granted, every time Ann met Draco, he seemed to be emotionally punch-drunk from some ghastly disaster or other, and certainly _she'd_ never felt the slightest yearning to do anything more physical than wrapping him in a blanket and giving him a square of restorative chocolate, but then it was some years since she had felt anything stronger than that towards anybody.

Besides, she thought, taking a firm grip on the handlebars of her thoughts and steering them bicycle-like around _those_ memories, even if she'd been batting around the wizarding world for the last twenty-eight years at the speed of an Exquisabeth Crabbe-Zabini-Shacklebolt-Hopkins, she still wouldn't have dismissed Draco Malfoy's looks as _milky_. There was nothing at all wrong with his sharp-boned pale face, and as for his grey eyes, she'd seen dark eyes with far less character. _In this very carriage_, she thought indignantly in the direction of Sacharissa.

She supposed, sensibly, that the problem wasn't the face itself but the man behind it. He did have an unfortunate way of looking as if he were _sneering_ at people. If she hadn't spent years seeing through Peter and Ginty's respective panics, she might have been taken in by it herself.

She was opening her mouth to try to explain some of this when two thoughts arrived at once and stopped her. The first was that Anemone seemed to be at that tiresome tearful age, and that it would be both foolish and cruel to provoke her into an argument when they might - who knew? - be on the road together for another fourteen hours yet. The second thought, which arrived in a rather Lawrie-like tone of voice and almost shocked her speechless just on the strength of that, was that the more thoroughly Anemone and her friend forgot that she was there, the more freely they would speak, and that might help her to work out what was going on.

Eventually she gathered that the brown-haired girl went by the submerged-sounding name of Anemone Gamp; that the dark girl was Anemone's best friend from a seminary for young witches in Bath, an orphaned heiress called Sacharissa Peverell, and that she, Ann, seemed to be some kind of governess-companion, expected to teach the piano to Anemone and to run such errands as Anemone's mother Lady Gamp decreed, and to act as chaperone, occasional _confidante_, and finder of gloves, parasols and overshoes as needed. It all seemed completely baffling. She supposed it would certainly be a _different_ life from working at the Ministry, but when she had wished on the Wishing Rock, she had wanted things to be different for the Malfoys too, and she had _thought_ the Wishing Rock understood.

Outside them, the air turned chilly, and Sacharissa pulled down the leather curtain at one of the windows against the ink-dark cold of dusk. The coach stopped. A coachman, who, Ann was relieved to see, had a large warm coat and a muffler on, tapped politely on the window with both fingers. "Coming up close on the Swan with Two Necks, ma'am, if you or one of the young ladies would care to come out and Transfigure the sphinxes..."

"I'll do it," said Sacharissa. "I like Transfiguring." The look she gave the coachman suggested forcibly to Ann that if he was left alone in Sacharissa's company he would probably leave on four legs, or possibly six. He didn't seem to register it that way, returning her a slightly stunned expression of respect that blossomed into a grin the moment she wasn't looking.

"Isn't your coachman handsome?" said Sacharissa as she was handed back into the coach, putting away a miniature rosewood wand in her reticule and looking sleek. The cold had stung two spots of red into her otherwise colourless cheeks. "I heard Lady Gamp hired him away from the Potters, and Madam Potter was so angry about it she cursed every last one of Lady Gamp's dining-room chairs the next time she was invited round to play speculation."

"Oh, she did. They shouted people's weight whenever they sat down on them. It wouldn't have been so embarrassing if they told the truth, or if they were _obviously_ lying, but they said Mother was five pounds heavier than _she_ says she is and she went to bed in a passion. _I_ don't think Figg is handsome at all. Drive on, Figg," she added sharply to the coachman, who was waiting for Sacharissa to arrange her cloak before he shut the door. "I think that the very _best_ style of looks on a man is red hair and a freckled complexion. What do you think, Sacharissa?"

"I like that least of all," said Sacharissa decisively.

Anemone looked crushed and then resentful. "Well, at least no one's trying to make _you_ marry a cousin you've known since you were in leading-strings," she muttered.

Sacharissa raised a dark eyebrow. "_Is_ anyone expecting you to marry Draco Malfoy? I heard he was dangling after the Thomas heiress."

"Oh, _her_. I think it's vastly rude of her to be here at all. Why can't she go about flaunting her Galleons at balls in Barbuda or the Bermoothes or wherever it is she comes from? In any case, you're nearly as rich as her, and _vastly_ better bred," Anemone assured Sacharissa. "It's a shame she'll have to be at Mother's ball, but you know what Mother is for lionising Frenchmen and Americans and anyone else who dresses strangely and can't hold a fork properly. It comes with being a political hostess, I suppose. And you still haven't told me what you like best in a man."

Sacharissa leaned back against the squabs. For the first time in their acquaintance, Ann thought her expression almost pleasant. "Black hair and a brown complexion, and he must be above the middle height."

"Like Mungo Gaunt," Anemone sighed. "Oh, Sacharissa, are you _indeed_ going to marry Mungo Gaunt? I think he is the most romantic wizard ever!"

Sacharissa rubbed the edge of her thumb, half-consciously, over the heavy, ancient-looking ring that she wore on a chain around her neck. "Indeed, I think I shall," she said smugly.

"Do you think he will propose at my aunt's ball?"

Sacharissa looked smugger than ever. "I hope to give him every opportunity."

It was dark by the time they arrived in London. The transfigured sphinxes, which still showed a tendency to pad rather than trot, pulled the carriage to a smooth halt. The inadequate street-lighting revealed a row of smart houses, with columns and pilasters, and high flat-windowed faces. Anemone looked doubtfully at Ann, then gave a small twitch of her miniature, ladylike wand. "Don't you remember the Fidelius Charm, Miss Marlow?"

"Why don't you practice it?" Ann temporised, telling herself uneasily that this _wasn't_ telling lies, it was just like being a prefect and making people do things themselves even if they thought they couldn't. Anemone murmured some words and gave her wand another tiny twitch. If Ann hadn't seen it in use, she'd have thought the exquisite gold-banded thing was a hatpin.

Two of the houses suddenly bulged out sideways, making room in between them for the flashiest-looking mansion Ann had ever laid eyes on. All gold spires and peacock domes and gilded, mullioned windows, with what looked like one whole turret devoted to an owlery, it fitted into the street around it like a Fabergé egg into a wren's nest. A regiment of footmen in spangled uniforms hurried out. One took the sphinxes' reins, one opened the door and let down the step, one offered an arm to Anemone to help her out, and several more started to unlash the luggage from the roof.

Ann wondered dizzily whether she _owned_ any luggage, and if so where it was. No one seemed particularly inclined to give her their arm, so she negotiated the step on her own and followed the two girls down the drive. The sharp chill of the night cut through the muslin. One of the footmen offered her a calf-length red cloak with a paisley pattern. She took it gratefully and wrapped it about her. It smelt of woodsmoke and someone else's sweat.

"Your mother has a Fidelius Charm on her house, Anemone?" said Sacharissa, looking almost impressed.

"Oh, yes, and it's Unplottable, too, for fear of agents of the Wizard Emperor. Whenever we have parties, the footmen have to bring everyone in by Portkey. Miss Marlow, haven't you brought the basket with the goose in it from Bath, and the parcels, and my hatbox? Look, they're still on the coach. I vow you _have_ been Confunded."

"It was probably that Clearwater chit and her friends," sniffed Sacharissa, traipsing down the drive in frail satin slippers. "I saw them leaning out of the window of the front parlour of the seminary when we left. I bet Madam Keith gives her my room next term, and I hope the chimney smokes at her as much as it did at me."

Anemone giggled. "I expect Madam Keith will have a fire in _every_ room, if she doesn't want an empty house next term and everyone gone to Scotland."

Sacharissa looked dubious. "Do you think Miss Lufkin really will manage to make the Ministry open Hogwarts up to girls again?"

"She's still the Minister for another month. I suppose she can do as she likes."

Sacharissa picked up her trailing draperies, giving the footmen a fine view of her ankles in the firefly light of the torches. "_I_ wouldn't wish to spend the year in a draughty barracks in Scotland with a lot of scrubby schoolboys."

Anemone nodded earnestly. "Just because something was done in the Middle Ages, I don't see why Miss Lufkin thinks it ought to be done _now_. They probably didn't _have_ seminaries for in Bath for young witches of quality all the way back then. They probably didn't even have _Bath_."

If it had been her sisters arguing, Ann might have tried to enlighten them; or, more likely, have tried to think of the right words, but been forestalled by Lawrie dragging the argument off on to some lunatic tangent or Ginty thinking everyone was making veiled allusions to the time she had refused to go to the Roman Baths in case she had to walk through underground tunnels.

As it was, she hesitated; then reminded herself firmly that, as Anemone herself had said, she _wasn't_ the governess. She was a Ministry official with a great deal of work to do, and the best thing she could do at present was follow the official policy of her own department, sit tight, and wait for Temporal Rearrangement to deal with the problem. And _then_ she would conduct a _searching_ investigation into how any of it could have been allowed to happen. The Wishing Rock clearly should have been put in the hands of the Ministry long before this.

The doors were opened by yet more footmen. "Take this, my man," said Sacharissa grandly, passing one of them a letter folded small and a Galleon coin pressed against the seal. Ann wondered unhappily whether this was her business, and decided that, once again, it was not.

She caught sight of the address on the letter. It began, _To the hand of Mr Mungo Gaunt_.


	6. Brothers in Arms

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter owes a great debt to the works of Georgette Heyer.

Draco stepped through a fireplace into a small, shabby room which smelt of damp wool and potion ingredients. The room was lit by a single candle in a candlestick on a table in one corner. It had to share the table with a good deal of clutter. Draco noticed assorted bottles and vials, some brown paper parcels, a pewter tankard, a braided military jacket in what Draco recognised from family portraits as the scarlet and peacock-blue of the Prince of Wales' Own Wizarding Fusiliers, and what looked like the remains of that morning's breakfast. Lumpy shapes in the shadows hinted of bed and chairs.

Standing with his back to the fireplace, at the edge of the candlelight, was a large young man in his shirt-sleeves. He had the most freckled-looking neck Draco had ever seen. He seemed to be mixing up some concoction in a large silver punchbowl. "Malfoy?" he said without turning round. "That you, old fellow? Just in time to try out my improvements on the regimental punch recipe."

"My cousin Furnivall?" Draco essayed.

The young man turned round, smiling broadly, and swinging his broad shoulders and the edge of his hair into the candlelight.

His very, very _red_ hair.

And, dear God, there were all the family features, coexisting as if in some dreadful Transfiguration accident. Charlie Weasley's apelike arms. Ginny Weasley's frank, open, _I-will-curse-you-into-next-week-and-feel-good-about-myself_ stare. That pompous idiot Percy's nose. The goonish grin he'd last seen on one or other of the twins, long enough ago that there had been two of them to choose from. And, most of all, the lankiness and air of slightly panicked stupidity that he would always, as long as he lived, associate with Ron.

_Mr Draco_, they'd called him back at the house. And they'd said, _your cousin Mr Furnivall_...

"My cousin Furnivall _Weasley_?" he asked, in a voice that felt as if someone had been at his vocal cords with a Paint-Scraping Charm.

"How many cousins called Furnivall have you got?" said the Weasley, gangling forward, causing the parts of Draco's brain that would forever be eleven years old to curl protectively up babbling _nonopleasedon'thitme_. "You're not quite the thing, coz. Not over the spattergroit by a long way. What you want to bring you up to the knocker is some of my patent punch. Sit down, sit down."

He hospitably flung a fur-trimmed military pelisse, a Chinese brocade cap, and several yellowed copies of an organ which seemed to answer to the _Journal Of The Magic Carpet Racing Fraternity_ out of a chair. Draco sat down in it. The alternative seemed to be being assisted across the floor by Furnivall, and he would be damned if he let a Weasley _touch_ him. He stared in a slightly concussed manner as Furnivall began turning over the parcels on the table, muttering to himself. The contents of the punchbowl gave a loud splattering hiss and turned silver.

"Critical point in the procedure," muttered Furnivall, sweeping the parcels up in his arms and dumping them into Draco's lap instead. Draco hoped none of them contained Dungbombs. "Be a good fellow and see which of these has the lemons in. Now, is it a pint of brandy to two spoonfuls chlorate of Harpy eggs, or _two_ pints of brandy to _one_ pint of gunpowder?"

"It can't possibly be a pint of gunpowder."

"No, you're right, I must have written _pinch_. Can't read my own handwriting."

"Tell that to Roonil Wazlib," muttered Draco.

"What?"

"Never mind. Furnivall, are you by any infernal - by any _chance_ planning to attend Lady Gamp's ball?"

"Wouldn't miss it for the world," said Furnivall brightly. "Glad you're back up and about, coz. Was wondering what I was going to do without you, to tell you the truth, because Crouch won't give me a lift in his carriage to the broom-racing at Newmarket because he's gone to a cockatrice fight in Hackney, and the devil's in it that I can't go to Hackney, in case I fall foul of that fellow Gaunt. Was almost bored enough to put on my knee-breeches and go to Belby's Rooms to do the pretty by the debutantes. Except that I can't, because I've sent them out to be cleaned."

"The debutantes?"

"The knee-breeches. Besides, very likely I'd meet Gaunt after all, trailing along carrying Lady Gamp's shawl and her posy of orchids, in company with that dreadful bounder Stump."

Draco ignored the matter of Stump, since his attention had been abruptly caught and held as if by an Unforgiveable some moments further back. "Did you say _Gaunt_?" he demanded.

"No, Stump. Gaunt's the other fellow. The one who keeps wanting to fight a duel with me. Thought he'd fled to the Continent, did you? So did I," said Furnivall mournfully. "It's all that stupid fool Stump's fault. Gaunt and Rosier fought a duel, there was Rosier at his last gasp, and what must Stump do but load Rosier onto his carpet and rush him round to the nearest Healer? As if getting that maniac Mungo Gaunt out of the country wasn't worth a small price like the life of that unutterable bleater Barnabas Rosier. There's taking your duties as a fellow's second seriously, and there's making a cursed officious jack-at-warts of yourself. Not that there's much I wouldn't believe of Stump. Probably thought that if he didn't save Rosier he'd never find anyone _else_ stupid enough to purchase a rotten borough and vote for him..."

"I wish you would stop talking about Stump," said Draco, resisting the temptation to add point to his words by throwing the parcels at Furnivall's head. Some of them might contain Dungbombs after all. He felt chilled in a way that couldn't be accounted for by the meagreness of the fire. "What about Mungo Gaunt?"

"You've gone quite pale." Furnivall poked the fire up. "That'll be the spattergroit, I dare say."

"Thank you for your medical expertise. _What about Gaunt_?"

"Don't you know Mungo Gaunt, coz? Don't see why you _should_ know him," said Furnivall fairly. "His people ain't anybody. I mean, they're respectable enough, I'm sure, but they don't mix in society. Prefer to squat out in the shires like a pack of Bundimuns. Gaunt didn't even go to Hogwarts, they sent him to some tuppeny-ha'penny dame-school in a place called Great Hangleton. Don't know why he should have decided to be the first of his line to make his mark in the world, but here he is, bowing attendance on your aunt like a confounded dancing-master and looking for a job at the Ministry. Never thought I'd miss Madam Lufkin until I saw what was trying to step into her shoes. Take Stump..."

"_Shut up about Stump!_"

Furnivall looked round. Draco tensed and reached for his wand, expecting the psychotic levels of fury that would have preceded either of the youngest two Weasleys cursing him or punching him, respectively; but Furnivall merely looked slightly hurt. Draco let his breath out slowly. His fingers unclenched themselves from around his wand. The Weasleys he knew were two hundred years in the future.

_And if I pushed Furnivall out of the window now, I might never have to meet them at all..._ He reluctantly discarded the idea. The last thing he wanted to do was to tangle with the early nineteenth century wizarding penal system, which probably ran to manacles, racks and public executions. "Never mind Stump now," he said more kindly. "I know what I meant to ask you. Have you heard of a witch called Ann Marlow?"

"You haven't even looked for the lemons. I never knew such a fellow." Furnivall tapped his wand on the edge of the punchbow. It began to spurt lemon juice. "Marlow... Marlow... is she a magistrate?"

"I should think it only too possible."

"No, no, I was thinking of the old dame who fined me for flying a carpet without lights last Michaelmas, and her name was Cromwell. I do recall a Marlow, though, somewhere, frilly-cap-and-slippers sort of a woman. Might have been your cousin Anemone's duenna." Furnivall pressed a cup of punch into Draco's hands. "Drink up and tell me what you think of it."

The punch had a smell that could only be described as pungent. Draco waited until Furnivall had turned back to the table before throwing his cupful in the fire, which promptly turned bright crimson and blue.

"Regimental colours," said Furnivall proudly. "Ain't got the scarlet quite right, though. Need some more selkie blood. Well, if you want to go and prose with your cousin Anemone's bear-leader, good luck to you, but you needn't think I'm going to leave my card along with yours. Might meet Gaunt. Book me up for two pair of dances with Anemone, will you? Anything but the minuet or the first two country-dances, because I already got caught for those by Miss Frewen. The yaller-headed one, not the one with the squint. Hope you don't mind, coz."

"I don't care if you abduct both Miss Frewens and run away to Scotland," said Draco, yawning. "As for my cousin Anemone, I don't know her as well I might," ha, _that'_s true, "but I shouldn't think she'd look too kindly on being asked to dance by a man who won't even bother to come to the house to ask in person."

"Don't want to explain to her about Gaunt," said Furnivall, taking a seat at the other side of the fire. "Not fit for ladies' ears. Embarrassing business. Gaunt was forever making toasts to a Lady of Bath, and I thought he meant dear little Anemone, and it turned out it was some other filly all along. You're sure you won't oblige me? I thought you didn't _want_ to marry Anemone yourself."

Draco declined to commit to any intentions concerning his ancestor's cousin Anemone Gamp. He knew his ancestor didn't actually _marry_ for another eight years, but who knew what entanglements he might have extricated himself from before then, particularly if he was in the habit of associating with Furnivall Weasley?

Furnivall sipped his punch meditatively. "Now I think of it, coz, I don't know that your aunt's lady-companion _was_ called Marlow at all. Seems I remember the name Hornby."

Draco supposed that it would have been too much to hope for, to find Ann safe under the roof of his aunt. He would have to go looking for her tomorrow. He wondered whether it would be better or worse to enlist Furnivall as some kind of native guide when navigating what his ancestor had referred to in the orientation lecture as rookeries and back-slums.

It had been a very long day. "Do you have anything to drink that isn't punch?" he enquired.

"There's half a bottle of brandy. _Your_ brandy, if you're going to be particular, I had it out of your father's cellars. I dare say he'd sooner you drank it than I did." Furnivall stretched out his legs and regarded his boots with an expression of slightly concussed contentment. "Fine girl, the elder Miss Frewen. Not much of a talker."

"Restful?" said Draco, somehow having no trouble seeing the allure of a restful woman.

Furnivall frowned pathetically. The combination of the frown and his foul Weasley countenance was enough to make Draco glad he hadn't abused his digestion with the punch. "Not so much what I'd call restful, no," he said pathetically. "Stands there and looks at you like a little piece of porcelain, and before you know it you've begged the honour of the minuet and the first two country-dances. Dashed disconcertin'. Belby should hire her to stand at the door of the card-room, he'd have the dance-floor full in no time. Not that it ain't generally full enough anyway, and not that Belby'd want to, he must make half his Galleons off those card-tables. I never saw a sharper operator that wasn't a goblin, and talking of goblins..."

Reckoning that by now Furnivall _must_ be off whatever he possessed in the way of a guard, Draco tried an experiment. "This Mungo Gaunt. He doesn't have a signet-ring he always keeps about his person, does he?"

"Not a signet-ring, no. He's got an old locket he's very fond of. Wears it on his watch-chain."

"I think I know the locket you mean," said Draco with restraint. His insides still felt cold, despite the brandy which Furnivall had solicitously produced. He was beginning to have an inkling of what the Wishing Rock might require. He wondered whether one would have to be pure of heart to pull it off. If so, he was doomed from the outset, and would have to put in a special plea that Furnivall be considered instead, since whichever demi-goddess it was who determined purity of heart did seem to consider the Weasleys... her _special_ children.

_I_ make use of a Vanishing Cabinet, I'm a vicious little would-be murderer, Draco thought, returning to an old grudge; _they_ make use of a Vanishing Cabinet, they're a pack of merry scamps...

The difference, he supposed, was that he actually _had_ been a vicious little would-be murderer, if a rather inefficient one, whereas George and the late Fred Weasley had never had any such intentions towards poor Montague. As far as they were concerned, Montague only actually existed whilst they were persecuting him, and anything that might have happened before or afterwards was so far out of their field of vision that they felt themselves actively ill-used if they encountered any moral consequences. But that was all in the past now.

Well, no, actually it wasn't. _Maybe if I just make Furnivall sign a paper promising that neither he nor any future Weasley will give his offspring any of these names: Arthur, Frederick, George, Ronald Bilius, Ginevra..._

Furnivall, who had been dozing in the chair opposite, started awake as the fire began to whirl. Draco's hand edged gently towards his wand again, and he pushed his chair back.

Three wizards stumbled out of the fireplace. The flames turned blue around their feet, possibly because of the alcoholic fumes that rolled gently off them. They were all wearing the same short, tight-across-the-padded-shoulders robes that Draco was finding it so hard to get used to, in elegant magpie-wing colours of plum and black and deep blue. One also had a buff cloak with so many capes and ruffles that he looked as if he had been gift-wrapped by some ancestor of Bruther, though it was hard, in Draco's estimation, to know who would want him. Another wore a green plush top hat of ridiculous proportions. The third had his arms around the shoulders of the other two and was singing a song about a Hippogriff.

"Weasley, we - why, _Malfoy_!" said the man in the cloak, beaming all over a nondescript face that might just have easily have belonged to a Diggory or a Corner as to a Flint or a Montague. "Bored with the shires? What you want is to come to Land's End with us and watch old Potter set off. Sir Peregrine Thicknesse bet him he can't hop on one leg to John O' Groats wishing every Muggle he meets on the way a good morning. Need someone to warrant he hasn't just Transfigured himself into a Monopod, and we thought of Weasley here, because everyone knows he don't like Potter _or_ Thicknesse."

"Don't I?" said Furnivall, looking puzzled. "Who's Sir Peregrine Thicknesse, and why don't I like him?"

The wizard in the hat offered Draco a hip-flask. "Come along and see the fun," he said in a fuddled tone. "Glad to have you."

Draco's ancestor had _friends_. Drunken, aimless friends, admittedly; rather bloody-about-the-knuckles friends in the case of the saturnine wizard in the hat, who was very obviously a Black; but still, friends. Friends other than Gregory. Draco supposed he liked Gregory better than anyone else who wasn't a Malfoy, but there was a limit to how many wistful journeys back into the Slytherin Dungeon one could _take_, and Gregory had no other conversation. "Ah - don't _I_ dislike Potter?" he enquired cautiously.

"Never heard you did," said the wizard in the cloak, looking startled. "Not that anyone would be expectin' you to repose your secrets in each others' boyish bosoms or anythin' of that sort, what with him being a year or two below you at Hogwarts, but mainstays of the Slytherin Quidditch team, the pair of you."

A mad smile began to burst into existence, just on the edges of Draco's lips. "Which of us was captain?"

The wizard in the cloak blinked in confusion. "Why, you, of course. Everyone knows the Potters ain't got a penny to bless themselves with. I declare, Malfoy, you're as fuddled as I am."

The smile jumped fully-formed into existence. It felt good, if a little unfamiliar. "Then we had certainly better be off to wish Potter joy," Draco declared, rising from the chair with an unnecessary but satisfying pomp and flutter of robes. "Coming, Furnivall?"

"I don't dislike Sir Peregrine Thicknesse," objected Furnivall, putting on his coat. "Very good sort of a man, I dare say."

"He said of _you_," said Draco, ruthlessly hustling him towards the fireplace, "that you know no more about making punch than his maiden aunt does."

"Did he indeed! Well, if Potter don't pink him, I will."

"It ain't a duel, Weasley," said one of the other wizards soothingly. "It's a bet."

"Bet? It's a deuced _certainty_! Talk of my punch-brewing skills, will he? I'll show him..."

The fires in the hearth whirled and settled, leaving the empty room behind them.


	7. You Did Not Desert Me

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter owes a great debt to the works of Georgette Heyer.

If the Marlows had been asked to nominate one of their own to go and tend to the whims of a Lady Gamp, Lawrie might have enquired as to whether Lady Gamp was on her deathbed and likely to leave her companion large sums of money and Ginty might have considered taking the job herself out of a complicated mixture of interest in high society and liking the idea of herself as that sort of person; but most of them would unhesitatingly have chosen Ann. Ann herself would probably have volunteered.

She didn't, generally, mind being interrupted; at least, not in the _glaring_ way Nicola did. She had, as a child, always positively preferred doing Peter's share of the washing-up or Lawrie's packing; she was swift and Peter was dilatory, and Lawrie more prone than not to pack her winter running shoes on top of her church hat if not watched. Besides, she had comfortably thought, they took care of things that _she_ didn't wish to, like making conversation with the alarming likes of Major Clavering, or amusing Fob.

All of this being so, Ann thought as she hurried up the back stairs with an armful of flowers for Lady Gamp's boudoir, she was dismayed by how difficult she was finding life in 1811. She hadn't realised how used to respect she had become, until she was suddenly in a position to command none at all.

And then there was the Ball. Had she been given sole charge of the Ball from the start, she would have rolled up her frilly muslin sleeves and got on with it. Had she been asked to help someone else plan a ball, she would have been delighted, particularly if it was someone with a Rowan-like gift for organisation; she had an uncomplicated liking for seeing things done well, from Lawrie's mimicry to the swift, sure ripple in and out of Peter's saw when he was carpentering.

But as it was, Lady Gamp oscillated between giving the Ball her full and exacting attention and leaving everything in Ann's hands, which, if not _unpracticed_, were certainly handicapped by being two hundred years out of time and not wanting to do anything that might cause problems for Temporal Rearrangement. If Ann had been prone to Ginty-like fits of exaggeration (which she was not, though she understood far more of the inner workings of Ginty's panics than anyone ever suspected) she would have said that it made her feel as if she were being repeatedly flung into floodwater and then dragged out by someone who criticised her swimming and threw her back.

Her heart sank further as she opened the door to Lady Gamp's boudoir. Lady Gamp was in one of her scrutinising moods. Ann could tell by the number of bills which were lying on a tray on Lady Gamp's meagre, be-furbelowed lap, and by the snap in the dark eyes under the frilled lace cap.

Lady Gamp was a ruthlessly thin small lady of a colouring that made her look more like Sacharissa's mother than Anemone's. Ann assumed that Anemone took after her father, the late General Sir Augustulus Gamp, though since in his portraits he looked more like a walrus in a forage-cap than anything else it could only be a guess. Lady Gamp was reclining on a day-bed in the uncomfortably spindly style generally known as Wizarding Empire. It was all of a piece with the rest of the room, which was a mixture of fake Roman austerity and Gamp frilliness.

Behind Lady Gamp, the morning light shone through drifting curtains. The sky of Wizarding London was visible beyond, the cold white-grey of late autumn, busy with brooms and carpets and a very young and unruly Hippogriff attached to a milk-cart. Ann wondered whether any of the people out there were Temporal Rearrangement and why they weren't getting on with rescuing her. She had considered, more than once, whether they knew she was here and had decided _not_ to rescue her. There were factions at the Ministry, however hard one worked at rising above them.

"Well, Miss Marlow. Did 'oo have a pleasant morning constitutional?" asked Lady Gamp with false and tinkling sweetness.

"No, Lady Gamp, I haven't had a walk at all this morning," said Ann meekly. "I thought I would go with Anemone and Miss Peverell when they walked to the Disappearing Library, to spare one of the maids. You know this morning the chandeliers are being cleaned, and..."

"What I mean, Miss Marlow, is that you seem to have made your way from the front door to my ickle bower via St. Jameses, or possibly Wandsworth," trilled Lady Gamp. "From whom are those flowers?"

Ann looked at the visiting-cards. "These roses are from Mr Stump, Lady Gamp, and the magnolia flowers are from Mr Hopkins."

Neither Mr Stump's nor Mr Hopkins' offerings seemed to please Lady Gamp very much. "Nothing from my nephew? I sent him an owl not two days ago requesting that he do me the favour of providing flowers from the Malfoy Manor greenhouses for my ball. Nothing could be less trouble to him, I vow, and yet he will not bestir himself. It is all of a piece. Young people are so _very thoughtless_. He does not even tell me whether he will dine here before the ball. I shall be forced to make my table up with the likes of Furnivall Weasley or Cadwallader Flint. Why are you dithering about with those flowers? Put them in a vase and come here at once, please. My sister Hornby always made it a principle to _anticipate_ my needs, but 'oo are too fine a lady to do so, I dare say."

Ann thought that it would probably be slightly easier to anticipate the path of a tornado. A distressingly sarcastic tornado, all Mechlin-frilled cap and bird-bones. She put the flowers in a vase and tapped her wand on the rim of the vase to summon some water.

Lady Gamp regarded her with scant approval. "Where had you that dress, Miss Marlow?"

_The same place all my other clothes came from_, Ann thought with a rare moment of something that was almost humour. She didn't think that citing the Wishing Rock would do much good. "I don't remember, Lady Gamp."

"If _I_ were given a dress that cost as much as I should expect to gain by my own industry in a year, _I_ should remember it," sniffed Lady Gamp. "It is far too fine. If you will not object to me giving you a hint, you should not be so fine. A lady two years from thirty may not be putting on her cap _quite_ yet - though if you are still in my service come Christmas and I am a little more satisfied with your work by then, I shall not think it too extravagant to provide you with the means to be making caps for yourself, so let that be an encouragement to you! - but it is not at all becoming in her to be pushing herself forward." She speared one of the bills on her small wasp-sting of a wand and poked it in Ann's direction. "Now, what is this?"

Used by now to Lady Gamp's abrupt changes of subject, Ann took the bill and looked at it. To her relief, it seemed to be in order. "It's for the services of Mr. Johnson's Superior Circulating Chamber Orchestra, Lady Gamp."

"And _why_ have I a bill from Terpsichorus Johnson, when I instructed you to hire the band of the Prince Of Wales' Own Wizarding Fusiliers?"

"They're all away in Scotland at present dealing with an infestation of sirens, Lady Gamp, and their colonel's secretary said he couldn't guarantee they'd all be home in time, or that they'd be able to get the sea-water out of the flugelhorn."

"And why did you not bring the matter to my attention? 'Oo seem to forget that this is not _oo_ ball, Miss Marlow. Now, have you arranged for the cleaning of the chandelier?"

"Yes, Lady Gamp, they're coming this morning."

Lady Gamp looked displeased. "It is not at all convenient to me for the house to be full of men in baize aprons this morning. I have my nerves to think of."

"I'm sorry, Lady Gamp, I thought you would be out of the house driving with Mr Stump."

Lady Gamp looked dissatisfied at the thought of Stump. It was one of the few emotions of hers that Ann had any sympathy with. Mr Grogan Stump was a frequent caller at the house. He was a dapper little man with butter-soft pale violet kid gloves and an equally buttery line of patter. As well as taking an interest in politics, he claimed to be writing a treatise on the three-fold division between wizards, magical beasts and spirits. Ann had assumed, generously, that he was in the habit of telling slightly salacious stories about harpies and Veela because he didn't think people would be interested in the dry matter of his study, until the day when they met unexpectedly on the back stairs and he tried to kiss her.

She didn't think he'd met anyone who had been taught magical self-defence by Professor McGonagall before. She had apologised to him, _several_ times, and particularly because her first attempt to Transfigure him _back_ from the form of a grey angora rabbit had left him with distinctly overhanging teeth; but he'd still avoided her ever since, and she suspected, complained of her in veiled terms to Lady Gamp.

Ann liked both Lady Gamp's other gentleman callers very much better, though that might just be because she felt so sorry for both of them because they were obviously head-over-ears in love with Sacharissa. Mr Hopkins was an American wizard on some kind of visiting secondment to the Ministry to discuss the problem of the Wizard Emperor. He was rather plain and had very good manners. Mr Gaunt, by contrast, was extraordinarily handsome and had terrible manners, but he reminded her so much of most of the Gryffindor boys she'd ever known that she could not help feeling fond of him anyway. He was honest, dashing, _meant_ well, and still seemed to end up glowering over the world's injustices more often than not.

An owl arrived at the window. Lady Gamp looked at its missive and sniffed. "Madam Derwent presents her compliments and wants to be paid the balance on Anemone's dress robes for the ball. Such impudence, when those lazy house-elves of hers haven't so much as finished sewing it yet."

"I expect she needs to pay for the materials, Lady Gamp."

"Well, she should have thought of that before she set up shop as a modiste. I have no patience with improvidence." Lady Gamp crumpled the bill up in her hand and threw it at the owl, which hwitted indignantly and flew off again. Lady Gamp leaned back against the cushions of the day-bed, closed her eyes, and looked put-upon. "_Poor_ little I shall be _exhausted_ with the preparations for this ball..."

A maid scratched at the door. "Mr Hopkins, ma'am!"

"Show him up," said Lady Gamp, drooping backwards languidly against her cushions. She snapped the fingers of one dangling hand at Ann. "Put those bills away - hurry now, girl, no one wishes the place to look like a demimondaine's bedroom - and arrange the magnolias in _front_ of dear Grogan's roses..."

The door opened. Mr Hopkins bowed himself in. Ann effaced herself from the room; as she hurried back down the stairs, she heard Lady Gamp lisping, "Oh, how _kind_ of 'oo, to come and see poor lonely I! And are 'oo come to ask for the first two country-dances, naughty boy? 'Oo knows poor little I does not intend to dance, but if my wicked boy does entreat me..."

As Ann passed the music-room, Anemone opened the door. She looked unusually plain and out of sorts. "Oh, there you are, Miss Marlow! I wish you would tell Mother and Madam Derwent that my dress robes _are_ to have the blond lace _and_ the roses sewn in the flounces. If Madam Derwent's house-elves can't do it in time I dare say it can't make any difference to you if _you_ do it. Though everyone knows Madam Derwent has a Time-Turner and sub-contracts all her work out to the thirteen hundreds, anyway."

Ann filed this away to be passed on to Temporal Rearrangement, whenever they actually got into contact. "I don't suppose we _should_ do this, but we can walk to the Disappearing Library past the Fusiliers' barracks, if you and Sacharissa like," she said kindly. "I'm sure Mr Weasley _would_ ask you to dance, if you happened to meet him."

Anemone stamped her foot. "What good is that to me when I never _do_ meet him! He'll go off and marry Harriet Frewen, you wait and see! Sacharissa says she heard Mrs Frewen telling Madam Potter that Harriet was engaged to him for the minuet _and_ the first two country-dances, and to Barnabas Rosier for the Scotch reel and the cotillion!" She gave a loud sob of mortification. "And I have to open the ball with my stupid cousin!"

Ann remembered the heart-searchings and tantrums that had accompanied the business of picking partners for the Yule Ball in her seventh year. She had thought, at the time, that it was all quite babyish. Romilda Vane asked Harry Potter to go with her and was refused, and had flung herself about the Tower like a discontented maenad for the first weeks of the next term, until she got interested in Duelling Club and forgot about it.

This was all quite different. Anemone Gamp didn't even have the _opportunity_ to ask Captain Furnivall Weasley to dance with her, she had to wait to be asked. And if she didn't manage to attract Captain Weasley or someone like him on a more permanent basis within the next couple of years, she would end up slipping down the social scale and having to be _grateful_ for the temporary return of any of the small comforts she'd grown up with. If she was really unlucky she'd end up like her Aunt Hornby, who eked out a cheerless life in a succession of other people's cottages and attics. Ann couldn't _imagine_ why people liked to read novels set in this period, unless it was to make their present lives look bearable by contrast.

"You don't want to dance with Barnabas Rosier," she said sensibly. "You know you said that the last time you danced with him you thought he was drunk and you had to keep slapping his hands. Have you practiced that sonata?"

Anemone shrugged irritably. "No, but it'll do well enough. No one ever actually _listens_. I should have taken Italian singing like Sacharissa, no one can hear themselves _think_ when she's screeching away."

Ann gathered that Sacharissa was out of favour, probably because of the crack about Harriet Frewen. She had met the Miss Frewens earlier that week and not known which she felt sorrier for - the one with the squint, because everyone looked at her and then looked quickly away, or the very beautiful one because everyone _kept_ looking and it obviously bothered her terribly. "Never mind the sonata this morning," she said, thinking sensibly that activity would probably be the best thing to coddle Anemone out of her sulks. "Why don't you come with me down to the kitchens and help make rout-cakes?"

"I'm not _ten_," said Anemone ungraciously. "Come in here and I'll show you the plate in the _Figure of Enchanted Fashion_ that shows how I want the lace and the roses to go."

_The Figure Of Enchanted Fashion_ was Anemone's chief reading material, supplemented by assorted first volumes of novels with titles like _The Sorceror Of The Moorlands: Or, The Vagabond Veela_. Sacharissa seemed to prefer second volumes, possibly because by that stage the lady authoress tended to have got the descriptions of the beauties of nature out of her system and moved on to the mysteries and abductions. The magazine lying on the chair was open to an engraving of a young woman swooning dramatically with her arms flung up in the air, in a way that Ann knew for a fact would have ripped her overly tight robes open at both armpits if she'd actually tried it.

Anemone flicked discontentedly through the pages. "Part twenty-seven of the General History of Hexes... Fashions in Fans... a True Relation of the Remarkable Life and Atrocious Crimes of Parsons the Poisoner... oh, look, the Society Dialogues. There's an engraving of my cousin." She thrust it under Ann's nose.

The engraving looked at her through a quizzing-glass. It certainly looked like the Draco Malfoy Ann remembered. The other engraving on the page, of an extremely beautiful dark-skinned witch, simpered. Anemone sniffed. "_We are informed by the friends of the lovely Miss T--- that an Interesting Announcement may soon be forthcoming_, indeed. I hope it's that she's going back to the West Indies."

The two engravings returned to staring at each other in profile across the page. Ann, looking at them, felt a peculiar lowering of spirits. She wondered whether this was what the Wishing Rock _intended_ to happen. Perhaps the problem with Draco had been that he was born two hundred years out of his time. It was an accusation that had been levelled at the Malfoys before. And perhaps _her_ problem had been that she was growing complacent at the Ministry, or something. But she had been making a _difference_ there, and she wasn't making any kind of a difference here.

She supposed, sensibly, that she should be grateful that she wasn't trying to support a large indigent family in a garret and a father in debtor's prison by selling watercress on the street, or anything of _that_ sort. And also, that if she and Sacharissa and Anemone didn't take their walk soon, it would rain. She said as much to Anemone, who had been admiring herself in the mirror over the mantelpiece.

"Yes, if you are _quite_ finished mooning over that picture of my cousin," said Anemone pertly. "I suppose you are making sure that the right young man approaches me to open the ball. Did you hear, at Madam Potter's ball, Cadwallader Flint brought along a Chinese sailor and said that he was the Celestial Minister of the Magics of Cathay, and..."

"Go and get your pelisse," said Ann, deciding _firmly_ that a walk was most certainly what was needed, to shake out everyone's crotchets. "And ask Lady Gamp whether there are any other little errands she wishes us to carry out on the way to the Disappearing Library."

"On the way _past the barracks_ to the Disappearing Library," coaxed Anemone, making a neat minuet-step around the corner of the carpet and curtseying to the piano. "Dearest, best Miss Marlow, do say we shall go that way, and never mind if Sacharissa does want to go the other way and look in at the milliners!"

From downstairs came three sharp raps at the front door; a pause, punctuated with opening and closing doors; and then Sacharissa came hurrying up the two flights of front stairs, busily tying on an unpleasant bonnet decorated with green ribbons and small bronze snakes. The two dots of red were back in her cheeks, looking as if they had been painted onto her rather thick white skin. "Anemone, only think, how delightful! Mr Gaunt is _also_ going to the Disappearing Library, and says that we positively must not set out without him, in case we need an arm up the hill! And if we wait only a little, Mr Hopkins will be finished talking with your mother about politics, and we shall have _two_ gentlemen to walk with!"

"I suppose he wants to borrow a book about duelling regulations. And you mean _you'll_ have two gentlemen to walk with," said Anemone sulkily. "I don't have _anyone_. Even my _cousin_'s going to marry Maria Thomas. _The Figure Of Enchanted Fashion_ says so."

It was _more_ than time, Ann thought, for that walk. She peeked in on the ballroom on her way down the stairs, to see how the chandelier-cleaning was progressing. All seemed to be well. The ballroom was on the first floor of the Gamp house. It only came alive three or four times a year; the rest of the time it was a rather gloomy expanse of emptiness cluttered up about the edges with little gilt chairs. Ann wondered how it would look in a week's time on the night of the ball.

\--

The ballroom was hung with silk in moonlit shades of pearl-grey and palest blue and a colour that, when ordered from Madam Derwent, had been identified only as snake-belly. Ann was rather relieved to see that it was a quite pleasant creamy pale green. Candles flared in all the sconces, pale blue roses were twined around the banisters of the stairs, and little floating witchlights bobbed above the polished dancefloor as if chasing their own reflections. Regiments of footmen in livery, some regular members of the Gamp household and some borrowed for the occasion from the Blacks and the Rosiers (but not, most certainly not, from the Potters) waited in expressionless ranks along the walls. Anemone stood on the stairs beside her mother, fussing at the sleeve of her dress robes. Lady Gamp had won her point on the matter of the blonde lace and roses, as Ann had known all along she would.

Sacharissa was looking unwholesomely lovely in deep red satin and flirting with the leader of the orchestra, a distinguished-looking black wizard in a robe with tails. The gentlemen who had been bidden to dine before the ball were conversing with each other. Or, at least, they looked as if they were conversing with each other; a closer look proved that Mr Hopkins was listening politely to Mr Stump, who was telling a racy anecdote about a hag, and Mr Gaunt was standing with one hand in his coat like the Wizard Emperor and glaring sulphurously at the recipient of Sacharissa's attentions.

"Damn me if I won't challenge that caper-merchant to a duel," said Mr Gaunt violently.

The leader of the orchestra went from looking sleek to looking alarmed, and turned away from Sacharissa to supervise his inferiors in their tuning-up. Lady Gamp looked around. "What does 'oo down there, wicked, wicked boys?" she said in a poisonously caressive tone of voice.

Ann rather hastily nodded to the butler, who returned her nod in a stately manner, disappeared briefly through a side door and reappeared with a happy procession of witches and wizards who had evidently just been ushered past the house's protections. A little of the cold of the outside air came in with them and made the candles flicker. The orchestra hastily finished tuning up and struck up something that reminded Ann of the music in the Ministry lift.

"The Minister of Magic, Miss Artemisia Lufkin!" announced the butler impressively. "His Serene Highness Franz Albert von Grindelwald-Luneberg, Supreme Mugwump of the International Confederation of Wizards! His Excellency the Mermish Ambassador!" The Mermish Ambassador, Ann noticed, was being manhandled up the stairs in an ornate fishtank by two sweating footmen. Miss Lufkin, in iron-grey and purple robes and a matching purple streak in her iron-grey hair, was, if anything, more formidable-looking than her portrait. Ann noticed that she gave a particularly sharp look to Mr Stump.

"Professor Willoughby Flitwick, Headmaster of Hogwarts!" continued the butler enthusiastically. "Colonel Sir Roderick Bole! Lady Pulcherrima Black! Mr Draco Malfoy!"

_Oh dear_, thought Ann. She wasn't even sure why. It was the sort of _oh dear_ that came in the vanguard of hearing that the roof of Trennels had blown off in a storm on the morning when her grandmother was expected; a placeholder for disaster.

Draco bowed from the waist, very correctly, and kissed Lady Gamp's proffered, lace-bedecked claw, then did the same by the hand offered much more ungraciously by Anemone. Ann found that she couldn't take her eyes off him. Looking at that bowed fair head and the fall of faultless dove-gray cloth across his straight, narrowish shoulders, she wasn't sure whether he knew he didn't belong here; whether he had recognised her; whether he actually was the Draco that she - well, she wouldn't say _knew_ \- at all, or some ancestor with a similar edition of the Malfoy looks.

"Mr Mercurius Potter! Sir Peregrine Thicknesse! Mr Cadwallader Flint!" continued the butler. His voice sounded curiously echoing and far away in Ann's ears. She leaned a hand on the banister behind her for balance, and pricked her finger on one of the roses.

Then Draco turned and looked at her. She still wasn't absolutely sure. He _fit_ into this setting, fit the way she did not, in everything from the way his cravat and shirt-points forced him to a proudly upraised chin to the polish on his boots.

And then he recognised her. He looked more discombobulated than she'd ever seen him, even on the first occasion when Dumbledore had tinkered with the house points to make sure Gryffindor won rather than Slytherin. It was definitely him. She recognised the very small scars on the skin of his forehead. She would have had _words_ with Harry Potter about that, if it hadn't been that it happened at the end of the term she left and no one told her about it until much later. Very much the same words, thinking about it, that the Slytherin prefects should have had with Draco when he had that fit of Leg-Locking Neville Longbottom whenever he went by. It went badly with Ann, even after all this time, to think ill of a _prefect_, but _still_...

He had recognised her too. One of the roses twined about the balustrade poked its face out inquisitively to sniff his ankle, and he nearly fell over it. Ann's hand twitched towards her wand, but it wasn't necessary: Draco took a half-step backwards into the arms of the person coming up the stairs behind him, who, from his looks, could only have been a Potter. Ann reckoned she was the only one who saw Draco flinch. Mercurius Potter kindly caught him and patted him down.

Anemone stamped her foot. "There, I _said_ I should have had the blonde lace and roses!" she exclaimed passionately. "I look like a great _looby_, and there is no need for you to pretend to be struck aback by my beauty in that _sarcastic_ fashion, cousin, for it is not at all my fault, but Mama's!"

"It wasn't _your_ beauty I was struck by," he said.

Anemone turned a wet, patchy pink with mortification. "How _dare_ you insult me at my _own ball_? I shall make Mr Gaunt fight a duel with you!"

"Anemone, be quiet," said Lady Gamp sharply.

"I shan't be quiet! And I shan't dance the first two dances with my cousin, either, not unless he says he's _sorry_!"

"That suits me very well," said Draco with a slightly mad light in his eyes. "Madam Marlow, will you do me the honour of the first two dances?"

He offered her his arm. She took it. Her hand rested against the small resilient bunch of muscle of his arm, warm under the layers of starched robes. It reassured her. She wasn't sure why; in fact, she thought she had probably better be the one doing the reassuring, because his arm was _shaking_. She supposed it was because of Mercurius Potter, though he really didn't look all _that_ much like his eminent however-many-greats-it-was-grandson, apart from having rather untidy hair.

"You were here all the time?" Draco said, she wasn't sure whether to her or to himself. "I could _punch_ Furnivall..."

"If you mean Furnivall Weasley, I could punch him myself," said Ann vehemently, letting him sweep her away down the staircase and into the ballroom. "Has he been avoiding asking Anemone for a dance on purpose? She's been fretting herself to shreds. If she was one of my Gryffindor first-years, I'd have sent her to Madam Pomfrey for a course of Strengthening Draughts and a nice rest in the infirmary."

"If she was one of my Slytherin first-years, I'd have drowned her in the lake. Madam Marlow, please don't tell me you've spent the last fortnight pandering to the needs of those two dreadful women?"

The ballroom seemed remarkably full of people staring, considering that the majority of the guests were still caught up in the log-jam on the stairs. Anemone had burst into angry tears and Lady Gamp was admonishing her. "I think," said Ann rather faintly, "that, under the circumstances, you had better call me Ann."

"Ann." He smiled at her. He had a much nicer smile than she was expecting.

"Mr Barnabas Rosier! Miss Maria Thomas! Mr..." the butler began, and then realised that since there was still a blockage on the stairs, he had better stop announcing for the time being. A large, red-haired young man in uniform had levitated up from the mass of wizards at the bottom of the stairs and vaulted over the banisters to join Anemone and Lady Gamp, though Ann wasn't sure his contributions to the discussion were doing much good. Draco looked around the ballroom and caught sight of Sacharissa, who was leaning on an ornamental plant-pot with an expression of unholy amusement on her generally rather sulky face. "Who is _that_?"

"Oh, that's Sacharissa Peverell," said Ann, grateful for a question she could actually answer. "If you pay her too much attention, Mr Gaunt will probably try to fight a duel with you."

Draco looked at her as if the words had been taken out of his mouth and carried abruptly off by some invisible beast which had also taken the opportunity to unfasten his underwear. "That would be _one_ way of solving the problem," he said, finally and, as far as Ann could see, entirely obscurely. "Except that I really can't see myself coming into a killer instinct this late in life."

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"I'll explain it to you. Can we go somewhere and sit down?"

"Yes, but they'll strike up the first dance in a moment and you'll need to go and make it up with Anemone so that you can open the ball."

"I have no intention of opening the ball with Anemone. Let Furnivall do it. It's him she wants to dance with anyway." He spotted a window-seat and steered them towards it.

"Are you always this ruthless about organising other people's lives for them?" Ann demanded in a rather out-of-breath tone of voice that she blamed on the tightness of the corset under her bluebell-coloured silk dress robes.

"Are you worried that I'm encroaching on _your_ right to do the organising? Don't be. If you tell me which people in this room you take a particular interest in, I'll undertake not to manage them any more than necessary." Draco saw her settled in the window-seat with an old-fashioned courtesy that seemed to come entirely naturally to him, and rocked back on the heels of his boots to survey the ballroom, which seemed to be filling up again. "Is that the Maria Thomas I'm supposed to be dangling after? No one warned me she was that short."

"She's not that short."

"She's chin-height on Flitwick." He sat down beside her. Ann could _feel_ Lady Gamp's cold, snapping eyes on her from across the ballroom. It wasn't as if he was holding her hand or anything. But when he fixed his grey-eyed, febrile and dementedly fascinating attention on her, it wasn't as if he needed to. "I think I've worked out what the Wishing Rock wants us to do."

"Oh, but we can't!" said Ann when he'd finished explaining. "If what you say about the Dark Lord's ancestry is true..."

"I know _he_ believed it. It isn't quite the same thing, I agree," said Draco with a small shudder of remembrance, "but it's the best we've got. If we make sure that Sacharissa Peverell _doesn't_ marry Mungo Gaunt, presto, no Dark Lord. _I wish it could all be different_, I said. Well, it looks like the Wishing Rock gave us that chance."

"But we're not _allowed_ to do things like that!"

"Who says?"

"The Ministry - "

"The Wishing Rock pre-dates the Ministry by a good thousand years, according to the sea-serpent one of my ancestors bought it from during a visit to Scarborough," said Draco. His eyes _glittered_."Think about it. No Voldemort. No Death Eaters. No pile of dead Hogwarts students in the Great Hall. No _families_ of dead Hogwarts students wondering why it was that special hero Harry Potter died and came back and he's the saviour of the Wizarding World, and their bog-standard Colin or Tracey or whoever died and didn't come back and they're a _statistic_. It was pure bloody chance that wasn't your Nicola and Lawrie and Peter in the middle of that charnel-house, and you know it as well as I do."

"What if they're other people's ancestors as well?"

"You'd be surprised and somewhat sickened to know how much the Gaunts kept themselves _to_ themselves between the 1800s and what I keep wanting to call today even though it's actually two hundred years in the future."

She hesitated. "What if we end up with something _worse_?"

That was when he _did_ take her hand. "We won't. The Wishing Rock doesn't cheat the pure in heart." His fingers pressed comfortingly against hers. She could almost feel the thrum of energy that was his pulse, under her skin and all the way up to her heart. "That would mean you, in case you weren't sure. In fact, if I were a gambling man, which I am _not_ after seeing Furnivall's luck at the tables, I'd say that if we played it right, you might end up with your heart's desire."

Anemone was marching onto the dancefloor dragging Furnivall like a child towing a pull-along toy by one determined fist. The orchestra was striking up the first notes of a minuet.

_Oh dear_, Ann thought again, realising all of a colossal thump, like an armful of washing falling out of an airing-cupboard into her arms, what her heart's desire was.


	8. As The Battle Raged Higher

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter owes a great debt to the works of Georgette Heyer.

After the stormy beginning of the ball, Ann was not looking forward to encountering Lady Gamp again. However, when the meeting actually occurred, in an alcove between the champagne buffet and a large ornamental rosebush, Lady Gamp merely stared at her with small, gleaming black eyes under her feathered turban, said "I suppose I do not need to ask how 'oo are enjoying the ball, Miss Marlow?" and passed on. Ann was not sure how to account for her unusual good humour until she looked at the dancefloor and saw that Anemone was dancing with the Supreme Mugwump.

Captain Weasley was standing at the edge of the dancefloor watching them with considerable displeasure. He caught Ann's eye and came over and bowed with easy, athletic grace that seemed odd in so large a man. "Did you ever play Beater?" she found herself asking.

He puffed his chest out. "Why, yes, I did! Two years for the Gryffindor team and three for the Army. Pleased you should remember, Miss - ah - Hornby."

"Marlow. Ann Marlow."

He looked surprised. "Could have sworn it was Hornby."

Ann assured him it was not, and after a while he seemed at least courteously willing to pretend to believe her. "Don't suppose he's going to _marry_ her, do you?" he asked disconsolately, watching Anemone make a smiling curtsey to the Supreme Mugwump and take hands with the ladies on either side to skip back and forth. "Fellow's a Grand Duke, they say. Ladies like that kind of thing."

As irritated as she had been with Furnivall Weasley during the week of his absence, he looked _so_ like a large, hangdog version of one of her Weasley nephews that she couldn't help wanting to reassure him. "Any number of men get married who _aren't_ Grand Dukes," she said sensibly.

He heaved a sigh. "Yes, well, if you ain't a Grand Duke you'd better have something else to offer. Take m'cousin. Broad acres, manor-house with everything up to the minute and no trouble with the drains, _peacocks_... Do you think Anemone would care more for me if I had peacocks?"

"I think Anemone would care more for you if you talked to her about this instead of me," said Ann more sensibly still.

Furnivall looked rather daunted. Ann supposed she was being too twenty-first century for him, and resolved to take it by baby steps. Anything could be accomplished if you broke it down into small enough pieces, as she had informed the Unspeakables when they came in to complain to her about an International Wizarding Directive about magical torture. They'd gone away looking rather shaken, and she'd never understood why. "You could at least take her in to supper," she added.

"Already asked her. She tossed her pretty head with that little wreath of roses on it and said she was sure I'd sooner take in Harriet Frewen. Don't know what the matter is with the girl." Furnivall frowned as if the weight of the world were on his braided shoulders. "I don't suppose _you_..."

"No, I wouldn't, thank you, Captain Weasley. I need to keep an eye on the caterers."

This, as she should have realised, only intensified her attractions in Furnivall's eyes, and he started quizzing her closely about the relative merits of Quintaped ham and sliced best end of Hippocampus, and the provenance of the punch. She eventually managed to shake him off in the direction of the Frewen sister with the squint, whose name she couldn't remember, and hurried off about her self-appointed duties. The anti-drip spells on the candles were still holding firm. The Mermish Ambassador was in hilarious good spirits, possibly because someone had been topping up his tank with champagne. The orchestra had no complaints beyond the brooding presence of Mr Gaunt, who was standing by a pillar looking like a Greek god and Transfiguring bread rolls into musical instruments before pulling them to pieces in a meaningful manner.

Ann looked at Mr Gaunt, searching for a resemblance to the descriptions she'd heard of Lord Voldemort. She couldn't see one, though perhaps she was being fooled by the way Mr Gaunt still had his own nose. He bowed to her in a questioning way, and she hastily hurried off again. Perhaps she couldn't see the resemblance because he _wasn't_ Lord Voldemort's ancestor, because by the time of the Dark Lord's birth all of this had already happened and she and Draco and the Wishing Rock had changed the course of history. She wasn't sure she found that comforting.

It was all too complicated. The one thing Ann was generally sure of was where her duty lay. At present she wasn't sure of it at all, and she found that about as disconcerting as not knowing left from right or up from down. It didn't at all help that various parts of her brain that should have been at least _contributing_ to thinking something helpful appeared instead to be bubbling like the Mermish Ambassador's tank. If this had just been an impromptu hop for six or eight couples, she could have sat down at the piano and let the music sort her brain into a semblance of pitch and rhythm. As it was, both the piano and the harpsichord were occupied by members of Mr Johnson's orchestra, who looked to be half-goblin twins.

She looked around the ballroom. Everything seemed to be running smoothly. The lines of dancers pranced towards each other and away, broke into fours and pinwheeled, and resumed their lines again, intricate as a crochet-pattern. She couldn't see Draco. She was almost _thankful_ for that. In this world, he was an eligible young man and she was a maiden aunt, and things wouldn't be that different, she told herself, when they got back to the twenty-first century. The events of his seventh year had bisected history; he and she might as well be a generation apart as three years.

Besides, she was no _good_ at this kind of thing. The only time she had thought she had what might be feelings, towards someone who seemed diligent and kind, and shared her feelings of occasionally not knowing what your own _family_ wanted of you except that what you had to offer them so often seemed to be wrong... well, the only good thing that had come out of _that_ was that he'd never known. It was a great and separate relief to her every time she visited her Weasley nephews.

"Oh, there you are, Miss Marlow!" said Sacharissa. "I need my flounce sewn up. Mr Hopkins trod on it."

Ann hastily stopped looking for Draco among the dancers, and whisked Sacharissa off to the music-room, which was doing duty as a station for a lot of cloaks, two lady's-maids who were reading _The Figure Of Enchanted Fashion_, and a very young house-elf who was asleep sucking her thumb. Ann fended off the lady's-maids and set to mending the flounce herself. "I'm surprised you gave a dance to Mr Hopkins," she said briskly. "Haven't you settled on Mr Gaunt?"

Anemone would have erupted into exclamations of how it wasn't _true_ and she couldn't think how Miss Marlow could be so _stupid_. Sacharissa merely lifted one white shoulder and looked backwards at Ann over it, her dark eyes hooded. She seemed to have been painting them with thin lines of gold-leaf, just above her lashes. "I'd be interested to know why you consider _that_ your business," she purred. "But then, you seem to think a lot of things are your business. What do you do when you're not pretending to be a poor relation, Miss Marlow?"

In other circumstances, Ann might have been flustered, and impelled towards honesty. Two weeks of Sacharissa, however, had been enough to armour her in that particular direction. She didn't know the Madam Keith who had been in charge of the child's moral education, but she wasn't sure whether she wanted to pay for the woman to have a long rest in quiet surroundings or report her to whatever Bath's seminaries had in the way of a licensing board. "I don't think you should drink any more champagne, Sacharissa," she said, which wasn't a lie, as far as it went.

Sacharissa hitched herself round on the small love-seat, almost pulling the flounce out of Ann's hands. "I've _watched_ you," she said. "You don't behave like a maiden aunt and you can't tell me you are one. You don't blush when you talk to men. You think you know better than Lady Gamp. _The servants don't despise you_." She delivered the last like a killing blow. "I want to know who you are and what you're doing here instead of Mrs Hornby."

Ann had come here to try to interrogate Sacharissa. She hadn't been prepared for Sacharissa trying to interrogate _her_. And if they _did_ go ahead with trying to separate Sacharissa and Gaunt, which, she thought unhappily, she still wasn't sure was the right thing to do, it would be ten times harder if Sacharissa was suspicious. "I think you're quite right not to take Mr Hopkins," she said thoughtfully. "It takes a certain strength of character to go out and homestead on the American frontier. You'd be better off in... well, Great Hangleton, I suppose... where it's all familiar."

"He lives in _Boston_," snapped Sacharissa. "And as for Mungo Gaunt, I have enough money for both of us, and _certainly_ enough to keep a house in London whilst he pursues his career at the Ministry." She narrowed her eyes again. "Are _you_ setting your cap at Increase Hopkins? Now that I think about it, you're exactly the sort of witch who would _like_ to be set down in the middle of nowhere to flap your sunbonnet at bears and wolves and charm your own butter-churns."

"Oh dear, is his name really _Increase_?" said Ann helplessly. It would be hard enough detaching Sacharissa from Gaunt, without trying to attach her instead to a person whose name sounded like some kind of measurement to do with gentleman's tailoring.

Sacharissa favoured her with another suspicious look, adjusted her ringlets in the cheval-glass and swayed out without bothering to say thank you about the flounce. Ann rather absently tucked a corner of someone's cloak around the sleeping house-elf. The lady's-maids looked at Ann with the air of two people who didn't want to presume.

"If you're Miss Peverell's duenna," said one of them finally, "you probably ought to know that she didn't tear that flounce through Mr Hopkins _treading_ on it, miss."

"Come to that, it might not even have been Hopkins," said the other one thoughtfully. "It could have been that Gaunt fellow, or Mr Johnson."

"I'd like to see his orchestra," said the first one, and giggled rudely.

Ann wondered whether she ought to be shocked. Knowing Sacharissa, she wasn't. She wondered whether it would make the lady's-maids feel better if she _looked_ shocked, at least, but really, the moment for that had passed. Besides, she had done enough being shocked in the first twenty years of her life to set up a sort of treasury of embarrassment to carry her through the next twenty at least.

The sound of loud cheering came from the card-room. That part of the ball, at least, _wasn't_ Ann's responsibility, being solely a masculine preserve; unless the cheering was a response to Anemone dancing on a table, or something similarly catastrophic, she had no business setting foot in there. She peeked quickly back into the ballroom. Anemone was revolving chastely in the arms of Captain Weasley and directing smug glances, whenever she was facing in the right direction, at the Frewen sisters, who weren't permitted to waltz.

What she would do, Ann thought firmly, was go into the conservatory and pray. Not to _ask for a sign_, she hastily corrected herself - she wasn't _Lawrie_, she understood that one of the main things God asked of His children was that they have some confidence in the abilities He'd given them - but just to remind herself that she didn't have to face any of this alone.

Her arrival in the conservatory acted like a sudden unseasonable thunderstorm on Miss Thomas and Mr Cadwallader Flint, who had been sitting rather close together on one of the benches. Miss Thomas assured her that she had been showing Mr Flint some of the flowers of her native islands; Mr Flint asserted even more loudly that they had been looking for Miss Thomas's shawl, and then there was a confused moment of crossover before Mr Flint began going into raptures about the flowers and Miss Thomas started poking hopefully behind pillars and planters for the shawl. Feeling once again that this was _exactly_ like being a prefect, Ann firmly dispatched Mr Flint off towards the card-room, sat for five minutes making rather disconnected conversation with Miss Thomas, and then returned to the ballroom in her company. With any luck, Miss Thomas's chaperone would think she'd been with Ann all along.

Ann shook her head as she returned to the now empty conservatory. She was, on the whole, in favour of different roles for witches and wizards. It made for a sad, homogenised world, tasteless as prepacked Muggle food, without them. But she couldn't help thinking that there had to be a way to allow witches to be witches, and wizards to be wizards, without regularly expecting both sexes to be _idiots_. She supposed that a rule like 'An unmarried witch and wizard found alone in a conservatory will cause a scandal' had its advantages in protecting the innocent and the unwary, but she still couldn't help thinking that the only thing that came of not trusting people was that it made them behave in a more untrustworthy way than ever, whether it was a case of cuddling in a conservatory or leaking Ministry memos to the _Daily Prophet_. With a murmured _"Lumos,"_, she lit the lanterns that hid amongst the greenery. One of the tropical vines bent questingly down out of its pot.

Snow was falling outside. It made Ann feel even more as if she were suspended between two worlds; as if she need only breathe on the glass to break the spell.

The door opened. Ann heard the rustle of skirts. If it was Maria Thomas, she thought, back to look for another non-existent shawl...

It was not. Two young witches came in. Ann didn't remember seeing either of them at the ball before. They were both dark-haired and both astonishingly self-possessed, but otherwise they couldn't have been more different. One, with her expensively tasteful dress and jewellery, her dark fierce eyes and small high-bridged nose, could easily have been Sacharissa's rival for social supremacy at Madam Keith's seminary in Bath.

The other didn't belong in 1811 any more than Ann herself did. She was _equipped_ for 1811, from urchin-cut short hair to muslin dress robes to embroidered slippers, but she wore them all with the slightly amused air of someone dressed up in borrowed clothes for a day of someone else's favourite sport. She cast a spell. It was a very simple Charm that made bystanders look past the target and at something more interesting. There had been a fad for it at Hogwarts in Ann's third year, particularly among people slacking at Quidditch practice.

"Well, aren't you the belle of the ball?" she said, her smile putting an edge on her words like a knife-sharpener. "We've spent all evening trying to get you alone. You can leave everything in our hands from now on, Ann. I don't know if you remember either of us. I'm Tim Keith and this is Miranda West. We're from Temporal Rearrangement."

"_Oh_!" said Ann, gladly. "It's about _time_!"

Miranda and Tim exchanged a small, tight grin. "You wouldn't believe how many people say that," said Miranda.


	9. Gone To Hell

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter owes a great debt to the works of Georgette Heyer.

Ann's attention should have been on the two young women from Temporal Rearrangement. She _did_ remember them; one was Ravenclaw and one Slytherin, one Nicola's friend and one Lawrie's, though she'd always liked Susan Bones better. As it was, they were completely eclipsed in her attentions by the way that a pane of glass behind a large bank of pelargoniums in the corner of the conservatory had just _shimmered_. Ann watched it. It shimmered again. Then it shuddered, soap-bubble colours spreading out across it like ripples in water, and the pelargoniums shimmered instead.

The shimmer pushed its hood back. Draco Malfoy's head appeared, couped heraldically at the neck. "Merlin's boots, do you know _how long_ I've been waiting to get my hands on this thing? I was _right_, it's about as like an ordinary Invisibility Cloak as you're like Anemone Gamp." He shrugged the shimmer off his shoulders. It resolved itself into a mercury-gleaming blur and then into a cloak, folded over his arm. "And it doesn't even smell of that foul pigpen of Hagrid's, because Hagrid's _grandmother_ is probably only a dull glint in the eye of some giant or other who can't think of anything better to do on a cold night in the Cairngorms. Do you think we could make a detour up to Scotland and see whether we can encourage Hagrid's ancestors to emigrate to Norway? I've already told Cadwallader Flint to put away half a guinea in a high-interest account to provide a monthly income for his however-many-greats-it-is grandson Marcus."

"Draco," said Ann desperately, "these are Tim Keith and Miranda West, from the Working Group on Temporal Rearrangement at the Department of Mysteries."

Miranda West looked suddenly fierce and detached. "Ann," she said with politeness but a total lack of deference, as one potentate to another, "I hope you know what you're doing. The Department has a certain budget for Obliviation, of course, but it's not usual procedure to reveal even the existence of Temporal Rearrangement to civilians."

"I don't know if you remember the Dark Lord's War -" said Draco tightly.

"The Ministry's _preferred_ term," said Tim Keith, her voice dancing with malice, "is the Potterian Triumph."

" - but I was as far from a civilian as you can get."

"I know that, Mr Malfoy. I also know which side you were on."

Ann wondered how on earth it was that she _knew_ that he was about one more provocation away from breaking down altogether, but somehow couldn't guess what form the breaking down would take. She supposed that the one thing he hadn't expected to have to face in 1811 was people who had known what he was like at school.

Tim conjured up a small device rather like a cross between a miniaturised orrery and a Sneakoscope. It whirred about in her palm. "Huh. Apparently Mercurius Potter losing his Invisibility Cloak in a game of cards _isn't_ a break-point, but Mr Flint's unsanctioned manipulation of the banking system is. We're getting letters from goblins." She put out a freckled hand without looking. Two letters, sealed with unpleasantly phlegm-coloured wax, fell into it. "Also, the probabilities have tipped a good six per cent towards a decisive victory for the Wizard Emperor Gustave Madmarengo over the Polish Wizarding Resistance next summer."

Miranda closed her eyes slowly and opened them again. Ann couldn't tell whether she was checking probabilities in her head, or just trying to keep a hold on her temper. She made her smile consciously non-hostile in the direction of Ann at least. It reminded Ann rather unpleasantly of Rowan trying to be diplomatic towards the variously woolly-minded, helpless, and sleep-deprived mothers of her sons' friends. "Let's go," she said.

"I didn't say I was going," said Draco. "I didn't manage to stop the Dark Lord when I was seventeen - I didn't even _try_, if we're going to be so bracingly honest with each other, which I gather we are - but I'm going to do it now."

Miranda blinked again, in slow-motion. "What are you talking about? _Your_ Dark Lord is dead. The one we're fighting here in the Regency never will be, not whilst there's a single Time-Turner left out there."

"Then neither will Voldemort. Either he and Madmarengo have both already been defeated, or neither has. Your argument doesn't hold water, Madam West."

Miranda made an economical little half-twitch of her head towards her colleague. Ann, watching, had the impression that the small motion was all she _trusted_ herself to make. "Tim, make a note for the permanent record that Mr Malfoy made a pro-Voldemort statement."

"You call that a pro-Voldemort statement? I could give you pro-Voldemort statements that would make your wand implode with shock."

"I don't doubt it. You always did _talk_ a good fight. Add, please, Tim, that he was seen in conversation with the Dark Lord's ancestor Mr Mungo Gaunt, and also spent much of the previous fortnight in Muggle London, presumably with the intent of finding Riddle ancestors."

"I was not looking for Riddle ancestors! It never even _occurred_ to me to look for Riddle ancestors! I was looking for Ann!"

"This is _nonsense_," said Ann, taking a stand. "Of course Draco isn't here to help the Dark Lord. Kindly remember that the Ministry is no longer under the rule of Pius Thicknesse. We do not condemn without trial."

"He did say that he arranged for money to be paid to Marcus Flint," put in Tim with irritating detachment. "Flint took the Dark Mark. It all came out at his tribunal, if you remember. The trail leads back to the Death Eaters."

"Well, I don't remember the particulars of the Flint case," said Ann astringently, "but I do know that I've been marooned here for two weeks whilst Temporal Rearrangement took its time about rescuing me. In that time I've spoken to any number of people's ancestors, and I would be very surprised if the same didn't apply to Draco, so it's ridiculous to single out Gaunt. You might as well arrest _me_ for talking to Sacharissa Peverell."

"Your comment is noted and will be made part of the record," said Miranda, still regarding Ann with those hawk-sharp eyes. Behind her, through the glass doors, the ball continued. Outside, the snow fell. "Draco Malfoy, I charge you formally and in the presence of these two Ministry witnesses, with the crime of wilfully attempting to divert the course of time. You will return to the Department of Mysteries with me for sentencing."

Draco shook his fair head. The glitter was back in his pale grey eyes. "No," he said, and swung the Invisibility Cloak off his arm. Ann caught her breath. The air flashed with magic. Ann, sensibly, ducked, and grabbed her own wand out of the sleeve of her dress robes.

Tim Keith gave her a hand up from the floor. "Now, me, I like a quiet life," she said with a smile that was quite remarkably engaging. "Let my superiors handle this, is what I say. I'll be here watching with admiration and providing backup in the unlikely event that you or Miranda need it."

Ann hesitated. She was, rather to the surprise of almost everyone who heard about it, one of the stronger witches in her family; it had helped her rise in the Ministry, and she had heard people speculating more than once that it had to be the reason she ended up in Gryffindor and not Hufflepuff.

She thought about all the names she'd heard read out at the service of memorial after the Battle of Hogwarts, the long drum-roll of them, some conjuring up images of homesickness or Quidditch posters or tears over failure to uncurse one's shoelaces after a run-in with the Slytherins, some which brought back no memories at all. She'd tried to commit all the names to memory, but they were too many. She thought, painstakingly, about the Polish Wizarding Resistance, who were all just as human and just as deserving of mercy as those Hogwarts students, and who might be overrun by the Wizard Emperor's minions because of _her_ unsanctioned interference.

It wasn't any good. Out of the corner of her eye she saw a blur of grey silk dress robes and the tips of blond hair. There came a time when you couldn't be on the side of humanity. You had to step down, hang your wings and halo at the door, and be on the side of _humans_. She caught Draco's eye. He looked as if he absolutely couldn't tell whether or not she was going to curse him. She remembered Vincent Crabbe's funeral. _Waiting to see whether the Ministry's peace-and-reconciliation policy involves sending me to Azkaban,_ he'd said.

He _wasn't_ going through that again. Not if she had a hand in it. And she did.

More than slightly to her own surprise, she raised her wand and cast _Petrificus Totalus_ on Tim Keith.

Tim toppled to the floor with an expression of total disbelief on her face. The battle was still raging on the other side of the conservatory. A curse flew over Ann's head and splattered into a Venomous Tentacula, which woke up and began infuriatedly hopping towards them in its heavy clay pot.

This, Ann thought, would _certainly_ be the end of her career at the Ministry. She only hoped the Wishing Rock knew what it was doing. She lifted her wand again and pointed it at Miranda West's elegant back. _I'm sorry_, she thought; _we really are all on the same side against any Dark Lords who present themselves, but I can't let you do this._ She flicked the wand in a complicated motion. The magic shone for a moment like a glyph in the air. _"Rentrego Temporis!"_

The air whooshed in and folded itself up about the place where Miranda suddenly was not. A dirty tram-ticket fluttered to the floor where she had been. As if hypnotised, Ann picked it up. Whatever was happening, in time or out of it, it didn't do to litter. The tram-ticket was dated 1934 and was apparently issued in the Federal Republic of Londinium. The Venomous Tentacula heaved itself hastily back into its corner and hid behind its own leaves.

Draco leaned against one of the pillars. His blond hair had flopped down over his brow. "That was - closer than I would have liked," he said with restraint. "I should have remembered she was one of the most talented witches in our year. Where did you send her? Or don't you know?"

"2004, and what on earth do you mean by _or don't you know_?"

"You're a Gryffindor. It was worth asking."

"Does fighting magical duels _always_ make you revert to being about fifteen years old?"

"Why do you keep asking me these _always_ questions? There isn't any _always_."

Ann looked at the tram ticket. "Well, _that_ might be truer than we know," she said helplessly. "I don't think we should have..."

"_No_." He took her by the arm. "No _I don't think we should have_. Or we'll both start second-guessing ourselves and each other and we might as well hand ourselves over to the Ministry now with the job half done."

And the dead of the Battle of Hogwarts and the dead of Madmarengo's spring campaign, Ann thought dizzily, would still all be dead. It would be the worst of both worlds. "I don't think Tim and Miranda are the only Untimelies we'll have to worry about." she said in a flattened voice. "They've probably substituted themselves for half the footmen. I should know, I approved the budgets."

"Couldn't you have chosen this year to have an efficiency drive?" Draco's thin face turned sharply towards the lighted doorway. "And is that my Aunt Gamp's bloody cicisbeo coming this way?"

Ann looked over her shoulder. She saw Mr Stump approaching from the direction of the ballroom, his arm about the waist of the plainer Frewen sister. His violet glove appeared at the other side of her waistband, prodding and kneading like some small and rather unpleasant animal. The Nonvidius Charm was stretched almost to breaking point.

"Well, whatever the rights and wrongs of any of this, I can't possibly leave an immobilised witch in the path of Grogan Stump," said Ann firmly. She tapped Tim's shoulder with her wand. "I'm _so_ sorry about this. _Rentrego Temporis!_ Oh dear, I do hope whatever's here in the twenty-first century isn't _still_ Fideliused and Unplottable, or they'll have such trouble getting out..."

"With all due respect, _good_?"

"And this conservatory seems to be on stilts, and if there isn't anything here but gardens in 2004 they'll fall..."

"If two Unspeakables can't cope with a fall from the equivalent of a first-floor window, I fear for the Ministry."

"They're not Unspeakables, I told you, they're Untimelies, they work for Temporal Rearrangement..."

The glass door opened. Mr Stump positively oozed through it, patting his companion's hand as well as other parts of her. He definitely wasn't looking in the direction of Ann and Draco, though it for obvious reasons it was harder to tell about Miss Frewen.

Draco flung the Invisibility Cloak over himself and Ann both. His arm slid about her waist and pulled her close. Because the Cloak was only intended for one, she supposed. The view out through it was curiously distorted, but showed enough of Mr Stump and Miss Frewen to make Ann uncomfortable. She _ought_ to have felt uncomfortable anyway, what with having just impeded two of Temporal Rearrangement's finest in the course of their duty, but instead she felt fizzily excitable and utterly calm all at once, like a very peculiar combination of champagne and childhood blanket. She had to fight an unsuitable urge to turn her face against the slubby grey silk of Draco's dress robes and just stay there until the world got less complicated.

"We can't stay here and _watch_ them!" she hissed.

Draco looked nauseated, from what she could see of him, which was mostly the underside of his chin. She'd never have thought that flat dancing slippers for witches and high-heeled buckled shoes for wizards would make so much of a difference in people's heights. "I quite agree. It would be a criminal waste of Lady Gamp's catering if either of us was sick into one of these flower-pots."

Miss Frewen looked round and gave a high sharp giggle. "Oh, Mr Stump, I think I heard something rustle over there. Could there possibly be _gnomes_ in this conservatory? I have a horror of gnomes."

Mr Stump detached himself reluctantly from her and poked about with his cane in the pelargoniums. "I think it most unlikely, Miss Frewen," he assured her. "Though, on the subject of gnomes, you may be interested to hear one of the, ah, _curious_ and _spicy_ anecdotes I collected whilst composing my Opus, on the subject of the mating rituals of the mountain trolls of Liechtenstein..."

The questing end of the cane caught the edge of the Invisibility Cloak. Draco gave it a surreptitious kick. By common and, on Ann's side at least, slightly panicky consent, they made their way out of the conservatory. They crossed the landing and went down the stairs at the pace of a very cautious sack-race.

Two very sturdy footmen guarded the front door. They both _looked_ impeccably nineteenth-century; except that one of them, in a fit of ill-spelt hero-worship, had at some point in his personal past had 'HARY' tattooed on one set of knuckles and 'POTR' on the other. Ann tapped Draco on the hand and pointed it out.

Draco set off towards the back of the house. Puzzled but willing, Ann went with him. The corridors got narrower; polished parquet gave way to bare floorboards, the wallpaper to distemper, and the candles in their sconces to nothing at all. He pushed the hood back so that his head was floating in mid-air again. But then, Ann supposed fairly, so was her own.

"Were you on different sides, back at the Ministry?" he said neutrally.

She thought about saying _we don't have sides at the Ministry_, but it wouldn't have been true. "No," she said. "I only knew Tim Keith as a signature on forms, and I generally agreed with what she did, if not always the way she went about it. I didn't know about Miranda West at all. I didn't even know she worked for the Ministry. But then it often _is_ that way with the really high security clearance Untimelies. They report directly to the Minister for Magic."

Draco looked like what he was about to say was likely to choke him. It was no _wonder_, she thought, that all the Gryffindors in his year had taken that look for superiority. "I've made a mess of this, just like everything else. Your career at the Ministry..."

"It was my whole life, I suppose. It wasn't a very _healthy_ life," Ann said, painstakingly truthful, "but at least I was doing some good. More good than opening Lady Gamp's letters and untangling her knitting. Did you use some kind of spell to come in through that conservatory window? Can we use it again to get out?"

"I didn't come in through the window, I Apparated into one of Lady Gamp's wretched flower-pots. For my next trick I'll fail to swing off a chandelier."

"Oh - yes, they warn the Untimelies about that. It's to do with fluctuations over time in the Earth's magnetic field, or with ley-lines, or something. Problems with Apparating, I mean, not anything to do with chandeliers. In fact, I'd much prefer it if you _didn't_ swing off any chandeliers in Lady Gamp's house, at least, because I've just had them cleaned, and..."

Two of the footmen came hurrying down the back stairs. Ann and Draco hastily retreated under the Invisibility Cloak, but it soon became apparent that the footmen were interested solely in each other. They decamped to a different part of the servants' quarters. "Honestly," said Ann pinkly, emerging from the Cloak again, "is _everyone_ here interested in nothing but - um - snogging?"

Draco leaned back against the grubby wall. The Cloak fell off his shoulders. Ann gathered it tidily up in her arms. She thought at first that he was having some kind of seizure, until she realised he was laughing. "I'm sorry," he said, sounding slightly hysterical, and not sorry in the least. "It's just - the way you said it, and your _face_ \- "

"What's wrong with my face?" said Ann, affronted.

He cupped the face in question in his thin-boned hand and looked into it. There was some soft obstruction in the way of her breathing, like an internal feather pillow. And that made her think of feather pillows in the context of Draco Malfoy, which certainly wasn't something she had expected to do when she got dressed for the ball that evening.

"There's nothing whatever wrong with your face," he said, very seriously, but with an edge of manic laughter remaining, like the sharpness of winter frost giving shape to the veins of a leaf and revealing its true nature. "It is, quite possibly, the most admirable face of my acquaintance."

"Now you're making fun of me."

"Believe me, _fun_ is the last thing I intend to make," he said sharply; and then, with a blink and a shake of his head. "That came out quite wrong. I'm sorry. Fun you deserve in extravagant measure. But also - "

His hand was cupping itself more firmly against her cheek, tipping her face up to his, shaping the future, rewriting history. She closed her eyes.

"I tell you, they haven't left the building. They're still Unplottable. And _be careful_, I think he's got the Dragon Lady under _Imperio_," snapped a voice from the stairs. It came with the added unwelcome clatter of two sets of feet. Ann and Draco scrambled themselves under the Cloak again, both of them made clumsy by the weight and heft of what had almost happened; both their bodies felt as if they should be navigating through the intricacies of a first kiss, and were dumbly reluctant to do what was actually asked of them instead.

The second person on the stairs gave a sharp whistle. "That's _possible_? She's not going to want that known when she gets back to the Ministry."

"You don't understand about the Dragon Lady. She won't _care_. She'll be the same ice-blue incorruptible whatever happens. That's what makes her so bloody scary," said the first voice. "You want to know something even scarier? I know her sister Ginty, and she says compared to her and the rest of her sisters, the Dragon Lady's a cream puff."

"I believe it. I knew a woman who used to be Lawrie Marlow's understudy. Let's go and check in with Ackerley and Clearwater," said the second voice. Ann thought they might belong to one of the hired catering staff and the tuba-player in the orchestra, respectively, though she wasn't certain.

Ann let out an indignant breath when the voices had gone. "We can't stay here. It's crawling with Untimelies. Where are we going to _go_?"

"Malfoy Manor," said Draco firmly. "I wish my aunt Gamp had this place linked up to the Floo Turnpike."

"I think she might have been hoping you'd pay for it."

"That does not surprise me in the slightest. Stay here, I'm going to have a word with Furnivall."

"I'm not staying here whilst you put yourself in danger!"

"I'm not putting myself in danger unless I know you're here to rescue me if it all goes wrong. Besides, there isn't room for you, me _and_ Furnivall under this cloak. I know Potter and his dreadful cronies used to more or less hold threesomes under there, but he must have been in constant danger of barking some tender part of his anatomy on Weasley's elbows or Granger's teeth."

"What are you going to ask Captain Weasley to _do_? And why _did_ you steal Mercurius Potter's Invisibility Cloak, anyway?"

"I didn't steal it, I won it at cards."

"I thought you weren't a gambling man."

"That's probably why I won. I thought it might come in handy for deflecting Sacharissa Peverell, but now I've got a better idea. Wait for me," he said. He dropped a neat quick kiss on her brow, and, whilst she was still recovering from that, whirled the Invisibility Cloak about him with theatrical excess and was gone.

It occurred to Ann that, without Floo, they were probably facing a journey to Wiltshire in whatever distressingly rattletrap conveyance Captain Weasley could muster; and also that she was in the vicinity of the pantry. She dusted her skirts down and went off to forage. She passed by a small high window. The sill outside was piled with snow to a height of about three inches.

He had _kissed_ her. Things like that didn't happen to Ann. Then again, neither did cursing Untimelies. She supposed she would have to answer to it at a tribunal, and _I did it because of the look on Draco Malfoy's face_ wouldn't be much of an excuse.

Well, she would worry about that later. Now was the time to be _practical_. Ann murmured a Charm over her small reticule; it swelled to the size of a large, frilly pale blue sack. Ann filled it from the pantry, conscientiously leaving a couple of Sickles on the shelf. Lady Gamp hadn't paid her for her services, but she _had_ provided board and lodging, after all, and it seemed shabby to take her bread and bacon as well without leaving any kind of recompense and leave the kitchen-maid to be blamed for it.

There was something she had quite forgotten to do. She leaned against the wall, pressing her cheek against the cold wall, and prayed. For herself, for Draco, for Anemone and Furnivall and the Polish Wizarding Resistance; for them all.


	10. Written in the Starlight

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter owes a great debt to the works of Georgette Heyer.

Furnivall's idea of transport turned out to be two large sledges, each drawn by a Thestral, which, fortunately, seemed not to need any guidance from the sledge's occupants besides being given a nip of whisky and told 'Malfoy Manor'. Ann waited in the stableyard, wrapping herself in the cloak Furnivall had unexpectedly provided and shivering as the snow settled on her cheeks and nose, whilst Furnivall and Draco had an argument. No one in the stableyard appeared to have any problem with seeing Captain Weasley arguing with thin air, which on the whole Ann did not find surprising. The result was that Ann ended up being handed into one of the sledges and tucked under a fur blanket by Draco, whilst Furnivall took the other sledge with Increase Hopkins. Ann was entirely confused by the inclusion of Mr Hopkins in the party, and only the cold which had already robbed all feeling from her feet and ears and was working on her fingers stopped her from joining in the argument herself.

The Thestral lifted its head on its long sinewy neck and took off at a spanking pace, leaving no hoof-prints on the snow. She could feel the warmth of her own body slowly colonising the furs; the warmth of Draco's, too. It would be just stupid not to share it. She hitched herself closer to him. He looked, for a fierce small moment, as if he'd won the Triwizard Tournament. Ann blushed. "They're very graceful," she said, mostly because she felt she had to say _something_. "The Thestrals, I mean."

"You can see them?"

"I was a nurse," said Ann, surprised it needed saying.

"Oh." He tucked an arm around her. She found herself gladder than ever that the Thestrals didn't need any attention in the way of active driving.

"What are we going to do?" she asked after a moment.

"Go to Malfoy Manor. I heartily doubt that it's infested with Untimelies. The butler told me he was under strict instructions not to hire any more staff until my father - excuse me, my great-grandfather - Lesath Malfoy comes home from the backwoods of Hungary."

"No, I mean what are we going to _do_?" worried Ann. "And why on earth have we brought poor Mr Hopkins, and why did he look as if someone had Stunned him?"

"I'm very much afraid that would be because I Stunned him," said Draco, not very apologetically. "As for why we brought him, we left a note for Sacharissa saying you'd eloped with him."

"You told Sacharissa I'd eloped with Mr Hopkins?" Ann was bereft of speech. Draco took the opportunity to find his wand and cast a Warming Charm on the sledge. _"Why?"_

"So that she'd come after us and demand that you unhand him, of course. If he's got the sense he's born with, which may still be possible despite his taste in women, he'll whisk her off across the Atlantic before she can change her mind." Draco grinned. "I thought about the bandleader, but then it occurred to me that if Sacharissa married _him_ she'd still be in London, and left alone every night whilst he was out bowing and scraping, and very likely she'd cheat on him with Gaunt and we'd be back where we started."

"How were you planning to make sure Sacharissa followed us but Temporal Rearrangement didn't?"

"Actually, I thought they probably _would_ follow us, but my butler would see them off with a twenty-seven inch braided unicorn hair and harpy heartstring fowling wand."

Ann took an indignantly deep breath. "If you don't mind me saying so, that's... I... well... excuse me, but... of all the _feudal_ ways of behaving!"

"I'm not feudal. I'm very enlightened. I could probably get depositions saying so from all eighteen of my house-elves."

The Warming Charm reached Ann's feet, causing them to ache as they returned painfully to the world of feeling. She knew rather how they felt. She wondered whether the Wishing Rock, which did after all have _Malfoy_ in its name, had landed her with Draco as some kind of moral project. "_Eighteen_ house-elves?" she said faintly.

"It's not my fault, it was a Ministry initiative."

"No one needs eighteen house-elves."

"Apparently seventeen other house-elves do. They... ah... flock." Draco considered whether that was the right word. "Pack? Clump? Can I take you out for a drink sometime when I'm next in London, supposing we're not both imprisoned in the bowels of the Ministry by then?"

"What on earth does that have to do with house-elves?"

"It doesn't, I just hoped if I smuggled it in with them you'd be less likely to say no."

"Ask me when I'm not eloping with another man," said Ann tartly and rested her head on his shoulder. In another two soundless beats from the Thestral's hooves on the snow, she was asleep.

When she woke, it was to an enchanted world. The Thestral appeared to have slithered out of its harness and disappeared - back, Ann hoped, to a nice warm stable, or at least to whatever habitat Thestrals preferred - and the world was silent with snow. The stars were cold in the sky. In front of them was a frozen lake, with a small classical folly on its far bank; in the distance stood a wood of pine trees, and a handsomely proportioned manor house. It was the only other building in the landscape, which might have accounted for its air of standing disdainfully aside from the rest of the world amid its skirts of snow.

A great yew hedge rose behind them and curved away to right and left. Ann looked round at it, trying to work out where they had come through it, and eventually came to the conclusion that they must have come _over_ it.

Draco was asleep. She watched him for a while, feeling the weight of being awake when the rest of the world slept. She wasn't used to having nothing to do. But if she moved she might wake Draco, and she'd never seen anyone who looked more in need of sleep. She reached out and tucked the furs closer around his shoulder; and then, when that did nothing to break the enchantment, ventured to stroke the hair off his brow.

Narrow brow and narrow skull. Blond hair, darkened where it was slightly damp from the melted snow, and already beginning to retreat just a very little, like the beginnings of a widow's peak, leaving a vulnerable extra centimetre of browbone exposed. Pale lashes and pale skin. One of his high, fleshless cheekbones pressed against the furs; the other lifted like a small copy of the rise in the ground, as if the very landscape itself here were Malfoy in its bones. She did not believe that he would be sleeping this soundly anywhere but in the grounds of the Manor.

Her hand slid down to continue her catalogue. She stroked his cheek with the back of her fingers. It felt rather like touching a gift before unwrapping it, though she'd never been particularly prone to that vice, reasoning sensibly that the surreptitious shakings that the likes of Lawrie went in for spoiled the surprise and were downright destructive if one's present happened to be, for example, a box of chocolates. Pale throat; narrow jaw; mouth peculiarly sweet when he wasn't awake to keep it in order. It was odd how different people looked when their faces were still. Like the poor Weasley twins, who had been quite the best-looking members of their family, but no one ever noticed because they kept pulling faces.

She didn't think Draco would appreciate the comparison. Still, given the existence of Furnivall, he and the Weasleys had to be related somewhere along the line. And, on the subject of Furnivall, where was the other sledge? Ann hoped they hadn't overturned, or, worse, careered into the lake.

She couldn't see any cracks in the lake's thick surface of ice. She _could_ see various shapes submerged under the snow, but whilst Ginty or Karen or even her mother would have had no hesitation in calling them wrecked sledges, to Ann's matter-of-fact gaze they were quite clearly a row of planters, some kind of couchant topiary animal, and a possibly ornamental wheelbarrow respectively.

Ann's gaze drifted back to Draco's mouth. She told herself that she ought to be thinking about something more useful, like how on earth she was ever going to explain to Miranda West that they _hadn't_ been wantonly messing about with the future of everyone on the planet for their own profit, let alone in some demented attempt to restore Voldemort; that, in fact, they were trying to _stop_ Voldemort, quite painlessly, before he ever even existed...

Probably she _should_ have left it all up to the Ministry. There were rules against this kind of thing, after all.

She had never understood until now why _there are rules_ wasn't always the end of the argument.

So, here she was, no longer the Dragon Lady, unless in the punning sense, and Ann had never been fond of puns. She looked down at Draco again, and at her own hand, lying against his cheek as if it belonged there. If this was her dragon, he was a rather unlikely one, but any knights showing up with intent to slay him would have _her_ to deal with.

No knights, for the moment, presented themselves. The world was still. Even the peacocks sleeping on the roof of the classical temple might have been carved from white marble. She thought perhaps that _this_ was the gift after all; that, for a little while, the world had left them alone.

She leaned down and kissed her dragon.

\--

Draco was having an exceptionally dull dream in which he was patiently trying to explain some perfectly simple Potions homework to Gregory and Vincent. The dream only took a turn for the unsettling when Gregory clamped both his large clammy hands to the sides of Draco's face and kissed him. He was still flailing about and trying to explain that no, that was _not_ what one did after bruising the pixie livers when he woke up.

For the first shadowy moment Ann's and Gregory's features were hopelessly confused. Draco wondered whether the Untimelies had somehow blasted him _forward_ in time to a point where Ann and Gregory had bonded, very possibly over being the only two people who cared about his disappearance, and the ungodly fruit of their passion was manhandling him in a sledge. He blinked. The resemblance to Gregory fortunately receded.

"I was having such a weird dream," he said randomly.

"Oh, good." Flame-cheeked and rigid with embarrassment, Ann removed herself as far as the design of the seat and the parameters of the Warming Charm allowed.

Draco wondered how he had managed to offend her in his _sleep_. Maybe he snored. Hannah had always complained that he cried and occasionally screamed in his sleep, but he'd rather hoped he was beyond all that now. "Where's Furnivall and the other carriage?" he asked, on the hopeful off-chance that it was Furnivall who had offended her instead.

"I haven't the least idea. Is this Malfoy Manor?"

It was. He recognised the pure, chill lines of the snowbound landscape. At least the Manor was putting its best face forward to impress her, whatever random flailings its future master might be indulging in. "Yes, it is," he assured her. "You see, over there, coming to meet us? Malfoy white peacocks. I don't treat them very well," he invented freely. "What I probably need is someone to remind me to be kind to them, and also to keep them in order so that they don't come in through the French windows and mug the guests at dinner-parties. Er, not that Abraxas has put in the French windows yet, but he will in 1930, and..."

One of the allegedly ill-treated peacocks blew his cover by poking its head trustingly in through the Warming Charm and investigating his pockets. Ann looked at it and at him, and then at the gardens, and gave a stifled exclamation.

"Draco, there's _another you_ coming up the path, with a wizard in a top hat and some kind of house-elf!"

It was, indeed, as Draco's sinking heart feared. First came Truckle, capering indignantly and shouting about incubi; then Draco's ancestor, in a completely different dressing-gown, this one of bright red Chinese brocade lined with red flannel, and what looked like a pair of internally heated fishing-boots which were leaving slightly steaming footprints in the snow; and finally, bringing up the rear with vizier-like dignity and the fowling wand over one shoulder, Yaxley the butler.

"... Thestrals, _two_ of them, mind you, taking great invisible bites out of Truckle's winter-sprouting!" frothed Truckle.

"... and I fear both Mr Furnivall and his colonial friend are _quite_ intoxicated from the Firewhiskey with which I understand they fortified themselves during the journey," intoned Yaxley in wounded tones. "I took the liberty of putting them in the old nursery, sir, since it seemed both illiberal and unseasonable to follow my first instincts and lock them in the coalshed..."

"Now see here," said Draco's ancestor gruffly. "First come the owls from my aunt Gamp - I've never heard such language out of a female - then Furnivall shows up soused as a herring, and now here _you_ are with half a hundred Madmarengists on your tail. At least, I suppose they're agents of the Wizard Emperor. They were making the devil of a noise outside the boundaries before I sent Yaxley out with the fowling wand to scare them off. I don't know how you carry on in your own time, m'boy, but I'll tell you to your face, it isn't at all the thing in mine," Draco's ancestor shoved his chin out belligerently over the collar of the dressing-gown. "What have you got to say for yourself?"

"I'm glad to see you're recovered from the spattergroit?" offered Draco hopefully.

"Tchah!" His ancestor was not mollified. "And who's this female?"

Draco was recalled to his social duties. "Miss Marlow, may I present - ah - Draco Malfoy. My great-great-grandfather. Great-great-grandfather, this is Ann Marlow. The lady I was telling you about," he added, in the vague hope that any of what he'd said about Ann and the Wishing Rock might have stuck.

His ancestor bowed from the waist, somewhat stiffly, due to the amplitude of the dressing-gown. "A pureblood, I hope?"

Draco opened his mouth frantically to say something, anything, even if it was an enquiry into the winter-sprouting, and hope Ann got the idea that she should _prevaricate_ at least; but she straightened her back, fixed his ancestor with the sort of look that made it quite clear how she'd risen at the Ministry, and said "_No_. And just as good as anybody despite it."

"She may not be a pureblood, but she's a Gryffindor," said Draco with something approaching fondness.

With the air of being forced to make use of the heavy artillery, his ancestor fetched a quizzing-glass out of one of his dressing-gown pockets and regarded Draco through it. "Females can't be Gryffindors. Even if old Lufkin does open Hogwarts up to the little dears again, stands to reason they'd all be Hufflepuffs."

Draco looked back at the yew hedge. He gave his wand an economical twitch. The spells it revealed to him were much as he had expected. "I hesitate to bring this up," he said, "embarrassing as it is for all of us and especially for me, considering that Miss Marlow hasn't even agreed to have a drink with me yet, but she did pass through the Family Line entirely unimpeded."

"That don't mean anything," snorted his ancestor. "She might be one of your father's by-blows."

"My father and mother had a very happy marriage!" said Draco, hoping it was still true. In any case, he didn't believe for a moment that Lucius would have cheated on Narcissa when they were practically on their _honeymoon_, whatever the old bastard might have got up to since.

His ancestor looked perplexed. "What's a happy marriage got to do with whether or not a man sires a few love-children? Now, ma'am, if you'll go with Yaxley, he'll show you out by the side gate and no doubt you can find somewhere to stay in the village. If you Confund the innkeeper into thinking you arrived last night with an abigail, I assure you no one at the Manor will give you the lie. Happy to provide the abigail, in fact. Confund her too," he added lavishly. "Yaxley, one of the kitchen-maids..."

"You will not do anything of the sort," interrupted Draco, his grey eyes steely, "if I have to get out of this sledge and _duel_ you for the right to knock some sense into your head. And if _you_ say another word, you unpleasant scabby-eared little bastard, you can be sure that I'll pick a duelling ground right in the middle of your precious winter-sprouting," he added nastily to Truckle before matching glares with his ancestor again. "Didn't you just tell me that the boundaries were crawling with - with agents of the Wizarding Emperor? And you suggest I send her out into that with no protection but a _kitchen-maid_?"

Yaxley coughed. "If I may speak, sir, you should have thought of that before you ruined the young lady's reputation. It does no good for your sort to mingle with Mud - "

"If you finish that word I shall feel _very sorry for you indeed_," snapped Ann. Yaxley looked rather dazed.

"_As I was saying_," said Draco, "and I'm very sorry about this, Ann, not least because it sounds to me like the ruin of all my chances - the Family Line let you through. And since my father and mother were very happy together, at least up until certain events which, as you may remember, I'm trying to make sure never happened, and I don't have any living cousins apart from some connections that we don't talk about through the Blacks, I _think_ you got through for the same reason that that peacock is trying to rest its head in your lap. The Family Line thinks you're the mother of a Malfoy Heir."

Ann looked at him; looked at his ancestor; looked at the peacock, and then, with a certain perilous dignity, slid forward so that her head was in her hands, and burst into tears.

"They say that's a good omen," said his ancestor helpfully. "When m'grandmother Mallidora Black was told she was betrothed to old Ganglion Malfoy, she cried for a _week_. Then again, she was only six. Why don't you come in and have some breakfast?"

Draco looked about him. Nothing, from the ruin of all his hopes to the way that his ancestor's heated boots had boiled away all trace of snow and were now causing the grass to smoulder, seemed at all worth mentioning. Beyond the house, the sun was rising. He patted Ann's shoulder. She didn't appear to notice.

He wondered whether, when Narcissa told him to bring home a bride, she'd had the least idea that what it would actually feel like was being the recipient of several curses at once and none of them the mercy of an _Avada Kedavra_. "And you can bugger off, too," he added moodily to the peacock, which gave him a sardonic look from one side of its narrow, overbred Malfoy head and retreated back towards the folly.

Breakfast was not a jolly meal. For one thing, it included Mr Hopkins, recovered from the Stunning and the Firewhiskey and quite conspicuously offended, despite Furnivall's attempts to make amends. For another, Ann recovered enough to have another spirited exchange of views with Yaxley, which left Yaxley mottled about the jowls with fury. Ann then took herself firmly off to inspect the servants' quarters, leaving both Dracos under no illusions as to the low standards she expected. Yaxley stood to fulminating attention beside the kedgeree dish, bookended at the other end of the sideboard by an alarmed-looking young footman, and muttered phrases like _a stain on the tapestry_ and _Mr Lesath shall hear of this_ without even bothering to particularly lower his voice.

"Well, Yaxley may keep the servants in order with the odd curse or two, but we certainly don't have a pillory," said Draco's ancestor, hurtly, as he helped himself to ale and sliced beef. "Not unless it's a place where the housekeeper keeps the pillows, and I don't know what your intended has to complain of in that. Saves labour, I dare say."

"She's not my intended."

"Nor she won't be, if you keep making a mull of it like this," chuckled Furnivall unfeelingly. It was just like Furnivall, Draco thought, to be the sort of person who could drink himself insensible by midnight but be clear-eyed and offensively jolly over breakfast.

"What _I_ don't understand," said Mr Hopkins plaintively, looking from Draco to Draco to Furnivall, "is what I'm doing here at all. It's all very well what you fellows say, but I don't see why I would have left Lady Gamp's ball to help you with a Thestral race. I don't know either of you particularly well, and it's rude to Lady Gamp."

"Fact of the matter is," said Furnivall largely, resting a beefy and confiding arm across Hopkins' shoulders, "you got tight as an owl, and confided in us that you wanted our help pressing your suit."

"With Lady Gamp?" said Mr Hopkins, looking appalled.

"No, with Miss Peverell. So _we_ agreed to spirit you off and leave a note saying you'd eloped with the abigail, and hoped little Sacharissa would follow."

Mr Hopkins gave way to a fit of coughing. "Ham go down the wrong way?" said Furnivall helpfully, and banged him with a fist between the shoulder-blades.

"That is the most ungentlemanly thing I have ever heard of!" spluttered Mr Hopkins. "Why, I was _told_ back in Boston of your debauched, Old World ways..."

"They've heard of me all the way off in Boston?" asked Furnivall, throwing back his broad shoulders so that he nearly split the seam of his borrowed dressing-gown, and looking pleased with himself.

"... but I never knew the rot went _this_ deep! To expect Miss Peverell, a gently reared young lady, to _pursue a man_, through snow and wind and roads no doubt infested with highwaymen, to..."

Furnivall dug Draco in the ribs. "You sure it's the right Miss Peverell he's sweet on?" he enquired in a resonant whisper. "It ain't a cousin or an step-sister or something he's looking to get leg-shackled to, and not Anemone's friend after all?"

"Whilst I am sure Miss Gamp would be willing - nay, _eager_ \- to do the duty of a true friend," Mr Hopkins was declaiming, "I still find your lack of respect for the fairer sex most repugnant, and I am sure any wizard in Boston would tell you - "

A footman appeared deferentially in the doorway and had words with Yaxley. Yaxley swelled once again to almost his former stately bulk. "Miss Anemone Gamp," he intoned. "Miss Sacharissa Peverell!" He bowed deeply, and ushered the two young ladies into the breakfast-room. A maid followed, eyes modestly downcast under a very large cap.

The gentlemen rose to their feet.

"Increase!" husked Sacharissa. "Oh, my _dearest_ Increase, she shall not have you, the designing old hussy, indeed she shall not!"

"Oh, _be quiet_, Sacharissa!" shrieked Anemone, flinging herself across the breakfast-room. Sacharissa stared at her in a mixture of slit-eyed fury and utter astonishment.

"Yes," Anemone continued furiously, "I told you to be quiet, and indeed I meant it, for I can't think why I ever thought I liked you, and I think it must have been because you were the only one of us who Madam Keith allowed to have a fire in her bedroom, and I can have a fire in my _own_ bedroom at any time I choose, so I don't need you sneering at me any further and making fun of my hats, and indeed I never did, and Miss Marlow was quite right about that! But that is by the by, because she _is_ a designing old hussy, and Mother was quite right about her, and no one in the world cares whether she runs off with Mr Hopkins or not, but she shan't run off with my Furnivall!"

The maid pushed back her mob-cap.

"Well, heart-warming as all of this is in its own somewhat derivative way," drawled Tim Keith, "I'm going to have to ring down the curtain before the final act. _Petrificus Multicorpus!_"

She blew on the slightly smoking tip of her wand, entirely for effect, and resisted the urge to rearrange the Petrified breakfasters into a more artistically pleasing tableau. She had work to do.

The possibilities were already in lurching chaos. She'd been chosen for the Untimelies at least partly for her skill at languages, and she was certainly earning her keep at present. Half the orders that came down from the future were in either French or German, and that wasn't even counting the weirder futures that kept edging their way in by way of letters on Art Deco cylinder-seals or delivered by sacred beetles.

She lifted her wand in an ironic little salute. "_Let us be thankful / For that which is, and with you leave dispute / That are above our question._ I'd arrest you all personally," she said, "but I have to save Time."


	11. Let Me Bid You Farewell

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Final chapter; in which it becomes clear why you should not meddle in the affairs of gardeners, as they are wise in the ways of airborne particles.

Ann was talking earnestly to one of the still-room maids about the folly of using Restricted Substances in her pickles when she realised that there was a disturbance out on the Manor's lawns. The still-room maid yelped and hid under a large reinforced table. Ann thought briefly about joining her, then pulled herself together and hurried out onto the nearby balcony, which was full of racks of wind-dried potion ingredients of various descriptions.

Either the Manor actually _was_ under attack from agents of the Wizard Emperor, which seemed, on the whole, unlikely, or Temporal Rearrangement had pulled out all the stops. Something that could only be described as an invasion force was advancing on the Manor from all directions. Ann hadn't seen anything like it since the Battle of Hogwarts, and she'd only been involved with _that_ at second hand, so to speak, as the casualties came in to St. Mungo's.

Something darkened the sky. It gave a coughing roar. She looked up. Surely they hadn't sent a _dragon_?

It wasn't precisely a dragon. It was a flying carpet, of a size that would have suited one of the Ministry's larger and more ornate meeting-rooms. It was piled high with boxes, barrels and bundles of all descriptions, not to mention something that looked like a partially disassembled four-poster bed, and something else resembling a very large birdcage full of smoke. A regiment of footmen were formed up at the carpet's tasseled front edge in two rows, one row standing and one kneeling, and a wizard in a bag-wig was commanding the operation from the four-poster bed.

The still-room maid, who had ventured out from under the table in order to ferry some of her rarer preserves to safety, dropped a large glass jar of preserved peaches and crossed herself. "Lord have mercy, the master's home from Hungary!"

The carpet swept alongside the balcony. Ann took another surreptitious look at the wizard in command. He was short and cadaverous, with a preserved, hungry-looking handsomeness that she'd only ever previously seen on matinee idols of a certain age and Carpathian aristocrats up on charges of unlicenced vampirism. His bag-wig was an unusual shade of silvery pale green, but there was absolutely no doubt, from the profile, the cheekbones or the air of command, that here was a Malfoy.

"Get off my land, you whoreson, piss-a-bed pack of curs and bastards!" he bawled. "Travelling footmen, first rank, ready your wands! Second rank, _Stupefy_! And it'll be _Avada Kedavra_ in the next volley if you don't turn tail and be gone, and so by God I give you warning! Be off with you, you pox-shot knaves, or by Merlin's arse you'll wish you were up before me at the next assizes for machine-breaking and Anabaptistry! First rank, prime your wands! Second rank, make ready - "

"What's he got against Anabaptists?" said Ann, hastily coming away from the window.

The still-room maid shook her head, too terrified to speak.

"Are you a witch?" persisted Ann.

The still-room maid bridled. "Of course I'm a witch. What do I look like, some kind of Muggle like those hired slatterns in the scullery?"

"Then pick up your wand and follow me," said Ann firmly. She remembered the drills that she had been at pains to see her Department followed, in case of invasion of the Ministry. First, muster your troops. Second, check for infiltrators. Third, mount counterattack...

Lesath Malfoy didn't know it, but he had reinforcements.

Ann mustered the upstairs staff. Only two of them proved to be Untimelies, and they were left tied up in a linen-closet. Ann tied a knot in the corner of her handkerchief; it wouldn't do to forget about it and _leave_ them there, not least for the sake of the linen. One of the housemaids had a fit of hysterics, but after the housekeeper, a very formidable Madam Bulstrode, offered to shove her into the linen-closet too she decided that she could do her bit for the defence of the Manor after all. Ann's forces had bested all the attempts by the Untimelies to enter the Manor by upstairs windows and were about to make their way down the front stairs when they met Tim Keith coming up them.

This time, Tim didn't bother with a witty aphorism, but reached straight for her wand.

Ann did likewise. "_Accio_ stair carpet!" she shouted. A flood of _Stupefies_ and Impediment Jinxes rushed past her ears on both sides. Madam Bulstrode even managed a Patronus in the shape of an enormous silver peacock. The stair carpet began to roll itself up under Tim's feet.

Tim lost her balance, but not her presence of mind. "_Wingardium Leviosa_," she murmured to herself, and floated upwards into the air. Another flick of her wand, and a Shielding Spell flickered into existence around her. The carpet rolled past under her dangling toes, leaving the white marble stairs curiously nude-looking. "Honestly, Ann, just because it's called a mid-life crisis doesn't mean you have to go back to the Middle Ages to indulge in it..."

"This isn't the Middle Ages, this is the Enlightenment!" squalled a furious maid in spectacles, firing off a jinx which ricocheted off into a family portrait of several simpering Malfoy sisters in farthingales.

"... and just because you seem to have developed some kind of sad, schoolmarmly crush on the rather dubious charms of Ferret-boy downstairs doesn't mean that you can bring the whole Ministry to a standstill. Why, the budgeting on this alone... _Confringo!_"

"_Protego totalus_!" gasped Ann, managing to spread the Charm of protection across her front rank, though one of the parlourmaids still slumped to the floor in a faint. "You don't understand. We're doing this for the good of the world."

"I've read your file. I never doubted you thought _that_ for a moment. _Rentrego Tem..._"

"_Obliviate_!" interrupted a rather splendid male voice from the bottom of the stairs.

Tim sat down rather hard on the bare marble stairs, looked around her in faint surprise, and started reciting Shakespeare in a sing-song tone of voice.

Ann's army all seemed to be bowing or curtseying respectively. Ann thought vaguely that that wasn't the usual effect of a Memory Charm, before realising that there was an altogether more mundane explanation. She leaned on the newel post at the top of the staircase for support and hastily took her hand away when she realised that it was carved into the shape of a striking serpent. "Oh, thank heaven," she said sincerely. "Draco?"

"I fear not, madam," said Lesath Malfoy. He had taken off the wig. Underneath it he had a quantity of silvery stubble. His eyes were dark and sharp, and reminded her unnervingly of Lady Gamp, who must - she supposed - be his sister. A large misshapen figure who could only have been a Goyle hulked along behind him, wearing, for some reason that Ann's tired brain was utterly unable to make so much as a guess at, a rather Ruritanian uniform and a somewhat charred leather apron.

Lesath bowed to Ann, which only made her feel more flustered than ever. Fortunately, two weeks with Lady Gamp had taught her how to make a curtsey.

"_May those who curse days curse that day, those who are ready to rouse Leviathan_," he quoted with relish. "_But thanks be to God! He gives us the victory_."

"I think those come in two different places," said Ann faintly.

"I'll thank you not to correct me, madam. I believe your sterling defence of my roof constitutes an introduction. Do I have the honour to address my son's intended?"

"I'm sorry, but _no_," said Ann with determination. "It's not your son, it's your great-great-great-grandson - oh dear, I'm not sure I've got that right, it was the Wishing Rock, you see..."

"Kindly don't babble, madam. You will do me the courtesy of taking sherry with me in the Best Receiving Room." Lesath made another bow of a crispness that suggested he practiced with a spirit-level. "With me, Goyle, you God-be-cursed witless scoundrel, and where a' pox is Yaxley?"

"I think he likes you," breathed Madam Bulstrode. "Come with me and I'll find you something to wear. You can't take sherry in a set of dress robes. It's not proper."

"I need to see whether Draco's all right first," said Ann firmly. Picking up her by now somewhat spell-blasted bluebell silk skirts, she made her way down the naked marble staircase.

The valet Goyle was already in the breakfast-room. He attempted to click his heels together at Ann's approach but only managed a sort of squelch. "Someone is impersonating the young master, madam," he informed her in a dull boom, indicating the two Petrified Dracos. "Also, the master gave me instructions as to what to do if Captain Weasley was allowed to enter the house again, but I don't know the Entrail-Expelling Curse."

"That's quite all right," said Ann, patting him reassuringly on his lumpy upper arm. "You uncurse _those_ two first." She indicated Sacharissa and Mr Hopkins.

"Miss Peverell," said Mr Hopkins, straightening his sadly crumpled cravat and squaring his shoulders, as one rising above the detritus of a decadent nation through moral fibre and force of will, "I wish you will allow me to take you away from this place."

"Oh, _Increase_, yes!" breathed Sacharissa, her dark lashes fluttering as she turned her face boldly upward for his kiss. "I am so _tired_ of London, and the more I think of it, the more I believe that the wide open unconquered spaces of America are the very place for me!"

Time and magic bore Ann forward, and she closed her eyes and surrendered to them.

\--

_A Hundred And Ninety-Three Years Later_

Ann and Draco found themselves in Diagon Alley, just outside Flourish and Blotts. For a moment they both looked around, in utter, silent relief. Everything about the place - the faint, diesel tang of the air and the soft roar of traffic that spoke of Muggle London outside, the posters advertising the next Quidditch World Cup, the small girl skipping by in a set of very new Slytherin robes and informing her parents disdainfully that she didn't want an unfashionable old owl, she wanted a _toad_ \- was a separate wonder.

"You're not Petrified," said Ann finally, reaching over to straighten the collar of Draco's blessedly ankle-length, wonderfully twenty-first century robes.

"You have no idea." His hands closed over hers. They felt dry, and warm, and more welcome than everything else about their return put together. "When I said that stupid thing about the Family Line, and you burst into tears..."

"It's not that I don't _want_ a family." said Ann incomprehensibly. "I do. I just didn't want to discuss it before we'd even had that first drink. And I thought - I thought maybe that was another part of the future that we were going to change, and then the _price_ of saving the world from the Dark Lord would be that it'd never happen..."

"Saving the world from the Dark Lord?" jeered a small boy emerging from Florean Fortescue's Ice Cream Parlour behind an ice-cream almost as large as he was. "Who do you think you are, the Boy Who Lived?"

"Get along with you and don't bother the grown-ups," said his mother. "I'm sorry about this - come _along_ now, Adam - "

"Well, if they'd told me that was the price, I wouldn't have paid it," said Draco resignedly. "I suppose even changing history isn't enough to stop the Boy Who Lived. Merlin knows what I'll do about my father's idiotic liaisons now. Or - well - if it turns out that I've changed history just enough that he and Narcissa _didn't_ make it through the Battle of Hogwarts..."

Ann put a finger on his lips. She lifted her face and leaned forward and upward, into the warmth and the comfort and the willing _choice_ of him. Her hand slid off the side of his cheek and around his neck. Kissing him wasn't like anything she had imagined, mostly because she'd never been one to bother much with imagining. She liked reality better.

She liked reality better than anything.

When they came up for air, she was still holding on to his collar, more to steady herself than anything else. He looked over at the bow window of Flourish and Blotts. Some things that might have been books lurked behind the sherry-coloured glass. "Wait here," he said. "I've got an idea."

"Do you _honestly_ think I'm ever going to trust you when you say _wait here, I've got an idea_ again?" Ann enquired breathlessly, following him indignantly down the three irrelevant little steps and into the warm papery fug of the shop.

"It worked last time, didn't it? Excuse me," said Draco confidingly to the mousy girl behind the counter, who simpered, "could you tell me which is the best biography you've got of Harry Potter?"

The girl stuck one finger in her ear and swivelled it contemplatively. "What, the Quidditch player?" she said doubtfully.

Ann looked at Draco. Draco looked at Ann. The girl looked, in a put-upon way, at a catalogue. "I don't see no biography here. There might be an interview with him in one of the magazines, I s'pose. _Snitch and Bitch_ is very popular. We _did_ have a calendar - _The Men Of Quidditch_, he was Mr. July - but they all sold out earlier this year. Might be another one next year, I s'pose. You want to put your name down on a list for one if there is? It's for charity."

"No, thank you," said Draco with restraint. "Harry Potter the Quidditch player, you say? I was thinking more in terms of the Boy Who Lived."

"What'd you say Harry Potter for, then?" said the girl in an admonitory tone of voice. "This one's supposed to be very good." She snapped her fingers and a book leapt from a nearby shelf. She wrapped it briskly up in brown paper and wriggly string, and spirited two Galleons out of Draco's hand before either he or Ann had a chance to look at the cover.

Back out on Diagon Alley, the air was chill, and promised rain. Draco was unwrapping the book. Ann supposed she should have realised he would be the sort of person who gave no thought whatever to the possibility of re-using the paper and string.

"_My Husband, My Hero_," said Draco in tones of stunned wonder. "By Lois Longbottom."

He handed the book to Ann. She looked at it. In the photograph on the back cover, a very tall wizard and a smart-looking witch were being clambered and squirmed over by four energetic brown-haired children, two plump and two skinny. In the background was a pond full of contented toads, presided over by a toad-patriarch of remarkable age and stateliness.

She flipped the pages. "It seems that in the first term of his fourth year Neville Longbottom defeated someone called Divrelmius Boot..."

Draco revolved anagrams in his head. "I BE LORD VOMITUS?" he offered finally. "It doesn't really have the same ring to it. _How_ did Longbottom defeat him?"

"Tricked him into giving a long ranting speech at midnight in a field of Love-Lies-Totally-Blotto, and hit him with the Sword of Gryffindor when he was overwhelmed by the pollen count, apparently."

"No stupid business with Portkeys at the Triwizard Tournament? No Ministry takeover? No Battle of Hogwarts?"

Ann shook her head. "Hang on - let me see what it says under _Malfoy_ in the index - oh, here it is. It does sound like your father had _some_ dealings with Boot, but apparently he offered the Ministry free run of the Manor greenhouses as a penance and was let off with a caution."

"Oh, dear Merlin." Draco covered his eyes. "My mother is very, very serious about gardening. We're going to get back to Malfoy Manor and find that, in this timeline, Narcissa's left _him_."

Ann put her hand in his. "We can go and see, if you like."

"I would like," he said, and his hand closed around hers.

\--

As it turned out, it was another three weeks before Ann managed to make time in her schedule to go and meet Draco's parents. She had a great deal to do. The Ministry she had returned to was a bizarre collage made up partly of the Ministry she'd left and partly of something completely different. It was rather fortunate that the Minister had gone to Antigua in a last-ditch attempt to reconcile with his estranged wife Exquisabeth Zabini, or Ann would never have managed to keep up even the _pretence_ that she knew what was going on.

It was difficult to explain why she'd Stunned Antonin Dolohov when she unexpectedly encountered him in the Ministry lift, though fortunately it turned out that his pockets were full of quills and Perpetual Paperclips and everyone thought she was just being unusually proactive in the fight against stationery-cupboard pilfering. It was even more jarring to find herself at the appeal hearing of Argus Filch, who had apparently been one of the most charismatic and powerful wizards among Boot's followers, and who was applying for an early release on compassionate grounds because there was no one else to tend his collection of white mice.

Worst of all was being invited to a service of remembrance for Augusta Longbottom, who had apparently died ten years earlier defending her grandson from Boot. Ann's encounters with the old lady had always been best described as _bracing_, but that did little to lift her sense of guilt. It was not, after all, the best of all possible worlds. It was only the world they had.

She was rather ill-at-ease about meeting Draco's parents. Draco, bizarrely, seemed considerably more ill-at-ease about the house-elves. They all looked like perfectly ordinary house-elves to Ann; possibly they were a little more servile than she was expecting, but that was probably just a side-effect of living in an isolated community without anything in the way of Ministry-provided outings and social clubs. But she did her best, and was relieved to meet what she thought was probably at least his father's second-best in return, though she wasn't _as_ sure about his mother.

Eventually, when Ann had relaxed enough to be talking quite naturally about the Muggle methods of repelling rising damp which were in use at Trennels, Draco slipped out. One of the Bruthers met him.

"Can Bruther be helping Master?" he enquired in an ingratiating squeal. "Bruther is eager to be of service! If it is not too forward of Bruther, Bruther would like to be reminding Master that there is an owl from Mr Crabbe which Master has not answered, concerning the arrangements for Mr Goyle's stag night. Bruther is sure you would like to wish Mr Goyle very happy, as Miss Vane is a fine figure of a witch, and in the family way already, so Bruther is confidentially informed, and we should all like to wish her most happy. Mr Crabbe asked if you would be willing to take charge of arrangements concerning the _exotic dancer_, and also whether he might draw upon the Manor cellars..."

Draco repressed a shudder. He put his hand on the creature's rubbery shoulder. "Never mind that now," he said. "Bruther, I want you to listen carefully."

"Bruther is listening!" squawked Bruther, looking up at Draco with adoring goggle-eyes.

Draco just about managed not to wince. He leaned down towards the ghastly little creature. "I'm going to tell you about a very wise, brave man who once did something very kind for some house-elves. I may even teach you a song about his exploits. His name was Ronald Weasley..."

On his way back into the drawing-room, he met Narcissa. She smiled at him mistily. "I'm just going to get the tapestry to show to Ann. Is she a pureblood?"

"One of her family visited here in 1811, if that's what you mean. I think she was some kind of connection of the Gamps."

"That's all right, then."

"Mother." Draco hesitated. "Things are - all right - between you and Lucius, aren't they?"

"Why on earth wouldn't they be? _Oh_ \- you're not still worried about that silly business he got up to, after he let the Ministry run riot amongst my greenhouses and I decided to go and take a long holiday in Crete with Exquisabeth Zabini?"

"What silly business?" said Draco cautiously.

"I told you, dear, there's no reason for you to worry about it. I didn't want to bother you at the time because you had your OWLs to think about, and I think it _highly_ unlikely that anyone will rake it up again now. _Particularly_ not if you marry into Ministry circles." Narcissa looked fondly back into the sunlit drawing-room, where Lucius was listening with a courteously poleaxed expression as Ann told him about her missionary work. "The whole scheme collapsed very quickly after I went back to him, and no one ever managed to prove it that it wasn't all the work of random, rogue Boot Lickers."

_Boot Lickers_? thought Draco, and then supposed it wasn't any _worse_ than Death Eaters as a name for a paramilitary wizarding supremacist group went.

"And really," Narcissa went on pensively, picking a long silver hair off the wallpaper, "as I _said_ to Lucius at the time, if you shed like a Persian cat every spring, you really can't go into a profession that requires you to sweep about in black velvet. I think he then suggested _white_ velvet, but whoever heard of a Dark Lord in white velvet? It would just confuse the Crabbes and Goyles. Besides, white turns his hair and skin the most unappealing yellowish colour, and it's not even as if he's smoked since 1979."

Draco felt like covering his eyes with one hand, or possibly doing a melodramatic swoon. How _could_ Lucius have thought, even for a moment, that taking up the mantle of the Dark Lord was a sensible proposition, _whatever_ kind of velvet the mantle was made of? Didn't he _know_...

Well, no, he didn't, and that was Draco's gift to him. There was one other thing to ask about. "Does Charlie Weasley ever mention his brother Ron and his wife?" he asked Narcissa cautiously.

"Whatever does that have to do with Dark Lords?" asked Narcissa, not unreasonably baffled. "Actually, the last I heard, I think the poor things were going for a trial separation. Something to do with Ron being _very silly indeed_ with an old friend he ended up working with at the Ministry and now there's a baby on the way. Really, you'd think even one of those - those _New Intake_ Gryffindors, isn't that the term the Ministry wants us to use these days? - would have _realised_ about the Weasleys and gone to St. Mungo's to get an Armouring Potion. So now the Robinses are demanding poor Demelza's dowry back and the Weasleys will end up poorer than ever with another two useless mouths to feed."

Draco leaned against the door-frame for support and tried to remember who Demelza Robins was. He had a dim memory of a small girl who once wet her robes at one of Narcissa's coffee mornings. "The old friend at the Ministry wouldn't go by the name of Hermione Granger, would she?"

"I haven't enquired into the _details_," said Narcissa tartly, "because I don't want Molly Weasley coming round here plumping herself down on the sofa telling me her woes and eating all the biscuits. It's quite bad enough that I have to read Exquisabeth Zabini's missives from Antigua, though at least it's better now that I've got the owls trained to lose the _illustrations_. I have never wanted to think about Kingsley Shacklebolt in that way."

She looked sharply back into the drawing-room, where Ann and Lucius were looking dubiously at an ugly small clock on the mantelpiece. "Good heavens, has she actually managed to get him to disgorge something for the Ministry's Christmas Charity Auction? Tell her _not_ that clock, it was a present from Mrs Goyle and she'll be hurt if she doesn't see it here. We'll get the Bruthers to put together a hamper, or something. And now I really _must_ go and find that tapestry."

Narcissa looked at Ann again; smiled mistily; and dropped a kiss on her son's cheek. "My darling," she said fondly. "How _clever_ of you."

From the pantry came the sound of someone beating time on a table-leg, one, two, one-two-three; and then the ragged beginnings of a choir of house-elf voices, making their first attempt at _Ronald Weasley Is Good And Kind_.

\--

_Epilogue_   
_Twelve Years Later_

Dear Mum and Dad

I am well and have been Sorted into Slytherin. I am sharing a dormitory with Albus Potter, Porteous Goyle, and two boys who look like Uncle Blaise but are not called Zabini. One of the Hufflepuffs looks like him as well. It is very confuseing. My best friend is Alice Longbottom. She is nearly as clever as me.

Please give my love to Grandmama and Grandpapa and Uncle and Aunt Weasley and all the Bruthers and Cissa and Tanaquil and Furn and Abraxas. Tell Cissa no one will treat her differently when she comes to Hogwarts next year because of Mum being the Minister for Magic because _nobody cares_. Alice's father saved the world and did all sorts of other cool stuff some of which involved troll bogeys and no one cares about that either. It is great. Tell Furn that feeding the peacocks is his responsibility now and he must be sure they get enough red meat or they will go for the dragon eggs and Uncle and Aunt Weasley will be cross.

I like everyone in my year except two girls, they are twins called Crystall and Serenitye Peverell-Hopkins. One has black hair and green eyes and is in Gryffindor and the other has black hair and red eyes and is in Slytherin which is the WRONG WAY ROUND don't you think? They are both American and talk all the time about how American wizarding football is better than Quidditch and how they can do wandless magic and things. They do not wear proper uniform so they look stupid, and they have twin black unicorns as pets which I think is against the rules. Alice and I are planning to catch one of the unicorns and _experament_ on it and see if it isn't a toad or something really.

Crystall asked me if I wanted to be her boyfriend but I said UGH NO THANKS UGH UGH. Serenitye said the same thing to Albus' brother who is really good at Quidditch and I don't know what he said but now she won't go anywhere near the Gryffindor tower any more. They are talking about finding the Chamber of Secrets but I don't expect anything will come of it because you have to be a parcel mouth and I don't think being from America and not knowing the right words for things counts.

My favourite lesson is Defence Against the Dark Arts with Professor West. She is sacastic and has favourites but she likes me and Alice so that is all right. She doesn't like Porteous Goyle. I asked her why a strong witch like her wasn't working for the Ministry and she said she could see who _my_ mother was and she couldn't think of anything worse. I think she meant she couldn't think of anything worse than working for the Ministry not that she couldn't think of anything worse than you Mum, particularly as she gave me some Gobstones.

Well I must send this owl now as I am going to play Quidditch.

Your loving son

Scorpius Malfoy

P.S Send more tuck.

**Author's Note:**

> Many, many thanks to [](http://coughingbear.livejournal.com/profile)[**coughingbear**](http://coughingbear.livejournal.com/) and [](http://frankie-ecap.livejournal.com/profile)[**frankie_ecap**](http://frankie-ecap.livejournal.com/) for beta-reading!


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